Pain & Gain Review

Welcome to the first edition of the Highlight Reel where i will be posting weekly reviews on films new and old. So without further ado here is our first Official Review:

Title:
Pain & Gain

Director:
Michael Bay

Main Cast:
Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie

Plot: 
Based on a true story which tells of a group of body builders kidnapping a rich businessman in order to steal his entire fortune and the events that follow after it.










Review:
Pain & Gain is the telling of a true crime story set in the mid 90's involving 3 body builders (Wahlberg, Johnson & Mackie) who attempt to swindle a millionaire out of his mass fortune, however after a series of mishaps this plan quickly turns from simple extortion to, torture & murder.

Mark Wahlberg plays the role of Daniel Lugo, a man who's warped sense of the American dream and inability to accept failure of any kind decides to do something about his life and get rich at all costs, his target millionaire Victor Kershaw a client of Lugo's from miami's Sun Gym.
To achieve his goal Lugo enlist's his fellow Sun Gym employee and steroid user Adrian (Mackie),  and an ex convict Paul (Johnson) to help kidnap Kershaw.

From the cast Dwayne Johnson is the standout providing one of his best roles in recent memory playing a character that is quite different to what we usually see from him, this shines through the most towards the end of Pain & Gain.

Pain & Gain does have a few odd moments, the cast provide alot of humor at the start but then the film flips into a more serious tone making it at times hard to believe that this is in fact a true story (It Is), which kind of confuses the message the film is trying to send. I also found going into the film most of the action scenes were shown in snippets on the trailer which led me to believe there would be a fair bit more action than what was actually in the film (rookie mistake haha).

Minor flaws aside, Pain & Gain is an engrossing film and it is something Michael Bay should be proud of directing especially after the terrible Transformers films and id proves he dose not need an over the top budget to put forward a solid film.

The Verdict:
 7.5/10

For more information here is a link to the story told by the real life survivor:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/27/true-story-behind-pain-and-gain


Thats it for now, thankyou for checking out the first edition of the Highlight Reel!!!!
till next time take it easy ;)