Not long after Paul Verhoeven directed Showgirls (1995), French filmmaker Jacques Rivette told an interviewer the movie was about “surviving in a world populated by assholes.” I thought of this line often while watching Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, which opened last week and is currently the number one box office attraction in the U.S. Nearly all the principal characters are loud, arrogant, aggressive, and materialistic. Even the people victimized by the movie’s thuggish protagonists—a trio of Miami bodybuilders played by Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, and Anthony Mackie—tend to be assholes themselves.
None of this is particularly subtle, but then Bay has never been known for his subtlety. He directed lots of TV commercials before graduating to feature films, and his visual style is defined by near-constant sensory stimulation. He favors blunt imagery, hyperactive editing, loud sound effects, and emphatic lighting that instructs the viewer exactly where to look. One of his favorite devices is cutting from one mobile shot to another, with the direction of the camera movement shifting drastically. His approach can be disorienting and, for some viewers, insulting. The most frequent criticism of his work is that it’s all surface, and he’s practically encouraged this interpretation with his Transformers franchise, inspired by a line of toys.
Directed by Michael Bay
