The Thick Have Their Needs, Too Michael Bay’s ‘Pain & Gain,’ With Mark Wahlberg 
 
 To describe “Pain & Gain” as a Michael Bay movie on steroids would be accurate but also redundant and a little misleading. Pumped-up, aggressive, muscle-headed entertainment is Mr. Bay’s specialty, after all, and while this grisly true-crime drama is partly about performance-enhancing drugs and the bulky men who love them, it is also, compared with “Armageddon” or the “Transformers” series, a stripped-down, modest enterprise in which no major American city is reduced to rubble. 
 
 This is not to suggest that the film, written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and based on a series of articles by Pete Collins (published in Miami New Times), is in any way subtle or restrained. The opening scene, a police chase from which the rest of the story flashes back, sets a tone of hectic excess. Mark Wahlberg, running from the heavily armed forces of law and order, dashes across rooftops and lumbers, sometimes in slow motion, through streets and alleys. The camera swirls around him, freezing as a glob of saliva pops out of his mouth, dropping down to allow us a peek up his nostrils and then tilting and sliding to register the impact of his face on the windshield of a car. 
 
 What follows is two hours of sweat, blood and cheerful, nasty vulgarity, punctuated by voice-over ruminations about Jesus, physical fitness and the American dream, along with a few tactical visits to a strip club. It all leaves you pondering whether you have just seen a monumentally stupid movie or a brilliant movie about the nature and consequences of stupidity. 
 
 Why choose? “Pain & Gain,” though it compresses some events and characters, hews fairly close to the facts as related in Mr. Collins’s deadpan chronicle of idiotic criminality and sloppy police work. Mr. Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a personal trainer and bodybuilding enthusiast who lands a job at a Miami gym after serving time for an investment scam. Swearing that he has learned his lesson — that there is no substitute for hard work — he sets his sights on a South Florida vision of the good life, egged on by a self-help guru (Ken Jeong) who fills his head with slogans and three-point plans for success. “If I deserve it,” Daniel says, “then the universe will serve it.” 
 
 What he feels the universe owes him is more or less what a teenage boy raised on “Entourage,” Grand Theft Auto and the oeuvre of Michael Bay might demand, though, since “Pain & Gain” is set in 1995, not all of those inspirations are available to Daniel. But the world, then as now, is full of hot babes, fast cars and money, tokens of a high-rolling, hedonistic existence just beyond poor Daniel’s reach. He is motivated less by ambition than by a self-pitying sense of entitlement that is both democratic and Nietzschean. He says that he wants to be just like everybody else but also that he wants to set himself apart from the losers and suckers in whose ranks he unfairly languishes. 
 
 One day at the gym, Daniel spots a ticket out of palookaville in the person of Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), a pigeon-chested blowhard who hires Daniel to help him get into shape and brags endlessly about his offshore bank accounts, his boat, his mansion and the sandwich franchise near the airport that for some reason is his pride and joy. Victor is enough of a jerk that it is hard to feel too bad when Daniel enlists two fellow gym rats — Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and Paul (Dwayne Johnson) — to kidnap him. Rather than demand ransom, they decide to torture him into signing his assets over to them. 
 
 Adrian and Paul have dreams of their own. Adrian’s are to overcome his steroid-related sexual problems and to win the love of Robin (Rebel Wilson), a nurse who specializes in such ailments. Paul, an ex-convict who has found religion, is a bit less clear about what he wants, and he clings to a sense of his own righteousness, even after some dramatic backsliding. Some of this occurs in the company of Sorina (Bar Paly), a Romanian-born stripper who had previously dated Daniel and who believes that he and his partners are government agents on a dangerous, top-secret mission. ||||| At least Wahlberg is matched by guys who can punch his weight. Mackie gets to jack up the nutsiness and still make Adrian the voice of reason. And Johnson perfectly blends the two sides of his screen persona. Always one-part supersized tough guy and two parts endearing family star, Johnson finds the humor in a man roasting severed hands on a grill as much as he does the soul of a guy gripping tight to redemption in the midst of 'roid rage.
– Michael Bay's latest movie is a bit of a shift from Transformers—it's a smaller-budget film based on a true story about bodybuilders who get involved in kidnapping. Critics offer mixed reviews: At Salon, Andrew O'Hehir calls Pain & Gain "a thoroughly reprehensible and frequently hilarious satire that depicts American life as a circus of stupidity, artificiality, and self-regard." Bay, he notes, "sends a clear message to those of us who've been making fun of him: He's been in on the joke the whole time." "Compared with Armageddon or the Transformers series," this is "a stripped-down, modest enterprise in which no major American city is reduced to rubble," notes AO Scott in the New York Times. It "leaves you pondering whether you have just seen a monumentally stupid movie or a brilliant movie about the nature and consequences of stupidity." But "why choose?" "The combination of the words 'Michael Bay' and 'steroids' should be enough to give any moviegoer pause," observes Liam Lacey in the Globe and Mail. The film "plays like Goodfellas as performed by the Three Stooges. As a genre-mashing exercise it’s almost interesting, but, really, why bother?" "Pain & Gain is arguably too much of everything—everyone jabbers on incessantly, and the movie is in love with its own outrageousness," writes Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. "But its biggest lift comes from the pumped-up (Mark) Wahlberg and (Dwayne) Johnson. They manage to find the humanity in all the adrenalized muscle."