Loved it. And I didn't think it was too long, running time was just perfect

This movie is awesome.

In a brief reprieve from the Transformers franchise, with its outsize budgets and expectations, Michael Bay delivers an amusing, colorful, swiftly paced, and often blunt-force-vicious comic crime drama, Pain & Gain. Set in Miami, the film is based on the true story of three bodybuilders whose get-rich abduction and extortion plot spins into ever more absurd and brutal directions as they find themselves in well over their big-ego, low-I.Q. heads. There could be a bit of a nauseating moral conundrum at play here as Bay and his team turn real-world cruelty and greed into a popcorn entertainment, but they toe a certain line, creating a film which strongly lampoons its protagonists and their grotesque vision of the American Dream rather than turning them into cult heroes. Dwayne Johnson in particular understands and explores this angle, delivering a very satisfying performance as a born-again Christian convict who fails again and again to practice what he preaches, always praising Jesus while reaching for the cocaine or baseball bat. Behind the camera, Bay has fun, dialing the primary colors and vertigo inducing motion to eleven and beyond. It is an aesthetic so nastily indulgent it becomes glorious. My main complaint rings true for me, yet may also sound paradoxical: at over two hours, this is a film which flirts with wearing out its welcome, but at the same time, the final 20 minutes have an unfinished quality, as if the film is in a headlong rush to reach the end credits after devoting so much time to earlier character beats and events. Maybe Michael Bay just gets bored when his camera goes into the largely brown, largely static territory known as a courtroom.

B

You didn't enjoy it quite as much as me, but I'm glad you liked it.