Pain and Gain is a true story about three nut-jobs who abducted a rich scumbag, legally robbed him of every asset he had, left him alive but homeless and penniless, and somehow got away with it for a good long while. My main takeaway from this film is never live in Florida, based wholly on the completely inept police response to this outrageous caper.

Pain and Gain approaches this whole story as an over-the-top comic farce, which might not have been ideal but was certainly understandable. What’s weirder, however, is that no attention is payed to exploring, or even explaining, the psychological or emotional state of the perpetrators. Instead, the film is happy to imply that the massive immorality portrayed in the story is a by-product of bodybuilding itself!!! Scenes of pumping iron and muscle obsession are carefully and constantly mixed in throughout the story, in a way that leads to a clear association of demented criminality with fitness mania. This seems spectacularly unfair to me. Two of these guys were obviously deeply disturbed individuals, time-bombs who were destined to explode on society no matter what their hobbies were. The other guy was just kind of slow and impressionable and got swept up by the other two. The fact that they all lifted weights was basically a joke, the strange context of their criminality, not the cause of it! I mean, it’s definitely funny at times, all these muscleman jokes and references, but after a while I found myself thinking “what does this filmmaker have against bodybuilding?”

One thing I did like about the film was the role of positive thinking in bringing about all this mayhem. Walberg attends a self-help seminar where he learns the universe will provide riches if he could just become a “do-er,” which to him means kidnapping, grand theft, torture and murder. However, even his warped interpretation of this crap advice is blamed squarely on bodybuilding, which is disappointing, given that positive thinking was way more culpable in this case.

I don’t know what to say about this film. It definitely holds your attention, the story is so utterly bizarre. It’s also quite funny at times, and exciting. The Rock gives a surprisingly nice performance as a slow-witted, Christian bodybuilder somewhat uneasy with cold-blooded murder. I think I would probably recommend Pain and Gain. Just don’t take its message about bodybuilding too seriously or too literally. Even if these guys had met in chess club, no good was going to come of it.