REVIEW - PAIN AND GAIN

Slate Michael Bay's Transformers movies all you want (and I certainly do), but at least they had a sense of structure. They went somewhere. They may have started out at 10, but they always managed to hike it up to 11 by the end. Pain and Gain starts at 10, and stays there for two entire hours. It's at once the fastest-paced and slowest-moving film you'll see this year. Bay's intention seems to be to induce vertigo in his audience - this is such an assault of noise and light, with scant awareness of spacial perception. He's working ever in the instant, delivering hit after hit of high-octane thrills, but his maniacal style of shearing off frames from the laser-lit shots, even clipping the ends of words of dialogue, makes it impossible to relish these thrills, as crass as they may be, and the result is a nauseating mess. Adding to the queasiness is Pain and Gain's rotten comedic slant. I'm the first one to defend pushing the envelope, but when Mark Wahlberg begins dismembering the corpses of his victims and the only apparent purpose of this is to make us laugh? I might have, were this not a true story, and I wonder exactly what is gained through all the pain this film both inflicts and ignores. I expect my reaction would be more positive if the humour was actually successful, but Bay has no understanding of comic timing, and the screenplay is hardly overflowing with opportunities for gags. It's all very well testing oneself, but there's no point in making a comedy if you don't have a sense of humour. The death penalty bounds into view at the close, and Bay seems stumped as to whether or not this is just another sick joke. But no, like the rest of this homophobic, sexist, cacophonous brickshit of a film, it remains a true story.