[Locke]

Just watched Pain & Gain.

Pain & Gain is Spring Breakers for idiots, but then Bay sorta fucks it up. You see the thing is, Spring Breakers was a fantastic movie, but Korine was so focused on making art and cared so little about anyone actually watching his art, he alienated pretty much everyone without a deep filmic knowledge in the audience. Bay tries his hardest to make Spring Breakers more accessible, by turning it into a comedy and placing absolutely nothing between the lines at all and for a time...it works, it works very well.

I know it's cool to hate on Bay, but I actually sort of appreciate just how much fun this guy wants to have with his audience, yeah his movies are often kinda stupid, and he doesn't care about grown men still collecting Transformers toys. But films should first and foremost entertain and he is an entertainer, and a good one at that.

The problems however arise, as the film moves from the first act and into the second. That is really where it clicks, our protagonists are deranged psychopaths. They are so stupid, they don't seem intimidating at all, they are just cute and fun to laugh at, but by the end of the first act swinging into the second, these men grow increasingly more desperate, and a dog backed into a corner will take the craziest measures to survive. And they take some pretty fucked up measures, while Bay still tries his hardest to play them for laughs, which makes it all the more unsettling.

Stupid people like safe movies, but what Bay reveals to his audience, just when he gets them comfortable, is that Pain & Gain isn't a safe movie. At least, not safe all the way through, Bay is actually willing to take risks. Compared to Spring Breakers Pain & Gain has the depth of a sheet of paper, but on its own merits as a popcorn flick for Average Joe, Pain & Gain revels in the moral grey. A world where brutal violence is played for all its messy brutality, but in a tone that suggests Bay finds violence hilarious, like an episode of Tom and Jerry but with all the gore left in, where people really get hurt and there are actual consequences.

And then, our psychopaths win. Sure their stupidity makes the whole thing come apart by the end again, so it isn't like evil wins the day, but for a time being evil reaps a lot of reward and I can imagine that for a while, Pain & Gain will probably alienate its audience as much as Spring Breakers did. Just not for as long.