More than a decade later, Dwayne Johnson’s darkly comedic turn in the action-packed Michael Bay satire Pain & Gain is still my favorite performance by the iconic wrestler-turned-actor. While Johnson is renowned for his charismatic screen presence and undeniable star power, he’s not known for being a particularly great actor. It’s unlikely that his name will ever appear on the Best Actor ballot at the Oscars. But just because he’s not a great actor like Marlon Brando, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a bad actor like Tommy Wiseau.

Johnson has the capacity to deliver a great performance; he just needs to find the right role in the right project under the right director. He gave forgettable turns in movies like Rampage, Skyscraper, and Baywatch, but those movies all lacked a decent script, a reason to exist, and a unique approach by an auteur filmmaker. Johnson gave what I think is his best performance in Pain & Gain – a movie that tells a fascinating true-crime story with a singular, wonderfully pitch-black comic approach by Michael Bay.

Pain & Gain Is Arguably Dwayne Johnson’s Best Performance

Johnson fully committed to the bit

While John Cena and Dave Bautista continually push themselves to branch out, try new things, and explore character types they haven’t played before, Johnson is often criticized for playing the same character in every movie. But The Rock is great at what he does. He brought an endearing sincerity to his turn as rescue helicopter pilot Ray Gaines in the thrilling disaster drama San Andreas; he won over millions of fans with his charming voiceover performance as Maui in Moana; and he gave his all to passion-project roles like Hercules and Black Adam.

But arguably the finest performance of his career is his turn as ex-con, bodybuilder, and born-again Christian Paul Doyle in Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. Pain & Gain turns the antics of the Sun Gym gang – a group of bodybuilding criminals who committed kidnapping, extortion, torture, and murder in Miami in the mid-‘90s – into a delightfully dark comedy. Pain & Gain provided further proof that Bay does his best work on a smaller budget. All of Bay’s best movies, from Bad Boys to Ambulance to 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, were made for well under $100 million.

Pain & Gain’s Michael Bay Comedy Suited The Rock Perfectly

Bay’s brazen, bombastic satire perfectly matched The Rock’s comic abilities

Bay’s brazen, bombastic sense of humor was perfectly suited to Johnson’s comedic abilities. Johnson isn’t the kind of comedic actor who can capture the quiet awkwardness of human interaction with the subtlety of Catherine O’Hara or Fred Willard or Jason Bateman. Instead, he gets laughs from the outrageousness of his characters. In The Fate of the Furious, Johnson got a big laugh by redirecting a missile with his bare hands. In The Other Guys, he got a big laugh when he jumped off the roof of a skyscraper and “aimed for the bushes.”

This style of humor was perfectly matched with Bay’s approach to the musclebound murderers’ antics in Pain & Gain. Pain & Gain presented Johnson with absurd situations like burning the fingerprints off of the murder victims’ severed hands on a barbecue grill. Like all the best comedic actors, Johnson committed wholeheartedly to the bit – and it resulted in arguably the best performance of his career.

The Rock’s Recent Movies Have Wasted His Comedy Chops

Jungle Cruise and Red Notice have very few laughs

Johnson’s comedic talents haven’t been properly utilized in five years. In 2019, Johnson reprised his role as video game avatar Smolder Bravestone in Jumanji: The Next Level, joined Jason Statham for the buddy-cop antics of Fast & Furious spinoff Hobbs & Shaw, and made an unforgettable cameo as himself in Stephen Merchant’s wrestling biopic Fighting with My Family. He was hilarious in all three of these movies. He had plenty of fun playing the different co-stars embodying his Jumanji avatar, he shared great chemistry with Statham in Hobbs & Shaw, and he was delightfully self-deprecating in Fighting with My Family.

In 2019, Johnson delivered three great comedic performances that proved once again that he’s just as adept at comedy as straightforward leading-man charisma. But in the half-decade since, none of Johnson’s directors have utilized those talents; Jungle Cruise was undermined by an asinine twist ending and Red Notice used its tired meta winks to the audience to point out the laziness of its own storytelling, not to make the audience laugh. All these years later, Pain & Gain remains the funniest – and best – performance of Johnson’s career.