Pain & Gain - Telegraph This is the confounding true story of Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a dim-bulb gym bunny who, in the mid-Nineties, unwittingly initiated a bloody trail of chaos that began with a get-rich-quick scheme and ended in multiple homicides. The zigzag plotting is partly attributable to steroidal jags, but events get so incredible that, shortly after Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is observed tossing severed human hands on a barbeque, an on-screen addendum seeks to remind us "this is still a true story." Bay's early action movies displayed a cocksure humour, but his new film is more subversive, routinely undermining its alpha males and presenting all-American beefcake as ultimately good for naught. One caveat: Bay's blunderbuss comic touch, which tends to blast any subtler satire into brash, cartoonish caricature. For once, though, the camera's obsession with hardbodies, and its grossed-out responses to unwaxed crotches, are absolutely descriptive of the story's screwy milieu, and not just of one director's warped worldview. Dumbly enjoyable on some level, indefensible on many others, Pain & Gain remains a guilty pleasure.