Michael Bay's pet project movie might be low-budget but it packs plenty of performance-enhanced muscle, writes Rene Rodriguez.
Michael Bay, director of the blockbuster Transformers trilogy and other huge hits, smiles when you tell him Pain & Gain - his self-described "small movie" made on a budget of US$26 million ($33 million) and shot entirely in Miami - is one of the oddest films to come out of Hollywood in years.
"This is a weird movie," the director says. "This is not the kind of movie the studios green-light much any more. I wanted to do something small and quirky. But because I've made Paramount billions of dollars with the Transformers movies, I told them: 'I'm going to make this movie'.
"They said: 'Why do you want to make it?' They were scared of it. But I saw something unique in this material. The best compliment I've heard from audiences who have seen it is: 'Wow, that was really different'. That's cool because it was intended to be a bizarre movie."
Pain & Gain is certainly different from anything Bay has directed before. It is character-based and performance-driven, with only one brief action sequence and, most shocking of all, just a single and rather puny explosion. In Pain & Gain, the story is wild enough to eliminate the need for pyrotechnics.
