Bay: Pain and Gain (2013)

Pain and Gain marks a bit of a break from Michael Bay’s recent ouput – it’s a period drama, set in 90s Miami, about the notorious Sun Gym crime ring, a trio of bodybuilders and personal trainers, played by Mark Wahlberg, The Rock and Anthony Mackie, who kidnapped, tortured and extorted one of their wealthy clients. In many ways, it feels like a return to a goofier, earlier Bay – Bad Boys in particular – which gives it something of an elegiac tone, as if Bay were contemplating and consummating his distinctive style before giving himself over to the Transformers series forever; at times, it feels like his last film as a director before becoming a franchisee in the manner of, say, Bryan Singer. Perhaps that’s why it feels so flamboyantly, extravagantly, anarchically embodied – Bay has long been the poet of the American military-industrial complex, and all his frenetic poetry is condensed here to the buff male body. Shot in convoy, the bodybuilders take their workouts – and their crime – as seriously as military service, and they need to, since they’re continually on the verge of becoming a mere bundle of autonomously twitching muscles; only the most punishing, severe workout routine allows them to retain some semblance of coherence. The Rock, in particular, has never worked better as a swathe of autonomous twitch – he seems to have reached some peak of muscular achievement where his body is exercising without his conscious intention or direction. And the more muscles and twitches dissociate themselves from characters, the more synthetic they seem – it is like watching a digital sensibility gradually dissociate itself from analog hardware, as Bay’s efforts to return to some moment of originary, self-made muscle continually thwart themselves. In that sense, it’s not unlike Nicholas Winding Refn’s yearnings for pre-digital machismo – except that where Refn’s analog bodies are threatened from without, Bay’s bodies feel threatened from within; you sense his bodies have always had prosthetic, synthetic, digital yearnings that the digisphere is just making harder and harder to resist. And, by the end, Bay has oversaturated his mise-en-scenes with so much machismo that testosterone itself feels just as artificial as the lurid, dayglo Miami backdrops – it’s just another exotic drug cocktail that the bodybuilders learn to navigate and manipulate, the intoxicating substrate of this frenetic, fratcore fever dream.