Michael Bay will direct Mark Wahlberg in Transformers 4 (official title TBD) for release in 2014, following a year after their collaboration on the “smaller” crime-comedy thriller Pain & Gain, costarring Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie.
Marky Mark plays Daniel Lugo, a Miami-based bodybuilder who’s searching for a more effective means to accomplish “The American Dream” (re: get rich quick). He recruits his colleague Adrian Doorbal (Mackie) and a weightlifter named Paul Doyle (Johnson) to kidnap a wealthy scumbag (Tony Shalhoub) and force him to legally give them his amassed fortunes. However, once this bulky gang of amateur crooks gets a taste for blood, money and the rich life, things start to spiral out of control (and fast).
Rounding out the cast are comedic types like Rebel Wilson (Pitch Perfect), Ken Jeong (The Hangover) and Rob Corddry (Warm Bodies), in addition to Ed Harris as the investigator Ed Du Bois, who is hired on to beat Daniel and his lunkheaded cohorts at their own ill-conceived game. The Pain & Gain green band trailer reveals as much, in addition to teasing the sort of ridiculous material you expect to see after reading the description “Michael Bay’s New Bodybuilder Action Comedy.”
By comparison, the red band trailer gets more into the dark humor and satire inherent to the Pain & Gain screenplay written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Captain America: The First Avenger). The plan seem to involve ridiculing what are really quite despicable characters – inspired by Miami’s “Sun Gym Gang” from Pete Collins’ 1999 Miami New Times article – and letting Bay eat his cake too, by filling the screen with all the bulging muscles, bikini-clad babes and testosterone-fueled action and crude humor as possible.
The final result looks to be a love/hate affair, but also something that holds your attention no matter how you feel. It could be the Michael Bay equivalent of Spring Breakers – something that appeals more to the crowd that made the Bad Boys series a box office sensation, with maybe even a little thoughtfulness thrown in for good measure (emphasis on maybe).
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Pain & Gain opens in theaters on April 26th, 2013.
