Something to watch tonight: Thursday 9 January

Pain & Gain (Bay, 2013)

On the sur­face, there is noth­ing about this film that should mer­it inclu­sion in this newsletter.

It’s dir­ec­ted by Michael Bay for a start, and stars Mark Wahlberg, two prot­ag­on­ists that I am not often fond of.

But I recall enjoy­ing it immensely and reviewed it thusly at the old Funerals & Snakes in September 2013:

Exercise is not always good for you, though, as the prot­ag­on­ists of Michael Bay’s under-rated satire Pain & Gain might con­firm. Based on the true story of a gang of 1980s Miami body­build­ers who short­cut their way to the American Dream by kid­nap­ping a loc­al busi­ness­man and for­cing him to sign over all his assets. Mark Wahlberg is the brains of the out­fit – if that’s not an entirely incor­rect char­ac­ter­isa­tion of the situ­ation – and Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie get dragged along with it. Johnson in par­tic­u­lar has a ball play­ing a born-again, sober, ex-con con­front­ing his demons in hil­ari­ous fashion.

It’s not without some ter­rible mis­steps but the script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely is so good I’m temp­ted to pin the blame for everything that doesn’t work squarely on Mr. Bay. Deliciously mis­an­throp­ic in ways that nor­mally turn me right off, Pain & Gain is my guilti­est pleas­ure of the year so far.

That column also fea­tured two for the oldies: Canadian drama Still Mine and over-80s table ten­nis doc­u­ment­ary Ping Pong, as well as Ryan Gosling in Nicholas Winding Refn’s viol­ent thrill­er Only God Forgives, coming-of-age charm­er The Way Way Back, the first film in The Conjuring hor­ror fran­chise, Neil Jordan’s sea­side vam­pire flick Byzantium, for­got­ten body hor­ror Errors of the Human Body and an almost equally for­got­ten super­hero film, The Wolverine, which I described this way:

Barely jus­ti­fy­ing a first view­ing, Hugh Jackman’s sixth (so far) out­ing as the moody mutant Logan, The Wolverine can’t even bring itself to find an ori­gin­al title – you might recall the last one was called X‑Men Origins: Wolverine. Like Gosling in Only God Forgives, he is a white dude get­ting up to mis­chief in some kind of Asian fantasy land, in this case a Japan con­struc­ted from ref­er­ences in that children’s ver­sion of Wikipedia.

Somehow, I man­aged to fall asleep dur­ing the loudest sec­tion of the film – an exten­ded digitally-constructed battle between Logan and some ninjas on the top of the fam­ous bul­let train – and the rest of the very stu­pid film could barely main­tain what little atten­tion I had left. It does make a nice change though for a block­buster movie to not be about sav­ing us from the end of the world, though, just anoth­er exist­en­tial crisis for the biggest wuss in the Marvel or DC universes.

Where to watch Pain & Gain

Aotearoa: Streaming on TVNZ+ (free with ads)

Australia: Digital rental

Canada & USA: Streaming on Paramount+

Ireland & UK: Streaming on Sky

India: Digital rent­al from Amazon

Further listening

RNZ have solved their pod­cast upload prob­lems and all three epis­odes of At the Summer Movies are now avail­able online.

This week’s seg­ments are Conclave, Nosferatu, The Room Next Door and Juror #2. Or listen to the whole thing at your 24 minutes of leis­ure.