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Two movies- Pain & Gain The Company You Keep

RJKarl

RJKarl

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I was surprised and very disappointed in Pain & Gain. I don't read reviews. The trailer and the cast made it look like it would be a caper flick about incompetent crooks with a little humor in it. I thought the combination of Wahlberg, Johnson and Bay had a lot of potential. Boy was I wrong.

It was about a group of stupid sadistic wannanbe criminals who when they made mistakes got worse. It had pretty scenery but that's about it.

I understand it was basically about a real crime and real criminals, but this was an awful story about really bad people. Johnson's cartoonish character was supposed to "humanize" what happened. He didn't.

Make no mistake I like Dwayne Johnson and Mark Wahlberg, but this movie sucked.

Robert Redford is back to his "power to the people" style in The Company You Keep. It has a cast of actors mostly in their 60s and 70s (Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte, Stanley Tucci, Sam Elliot and even Julie Christie) along with Shia Leboeuf Terrence Howard and bit parts for Anna Kendrick and Brit Marling.

Redford's acting was decent, but his directing was better. You felt like you were in the towns and following Redford's trip from outlaw to its resolution. Near the end some of the shots made you feel like you were in a live Monet painting.

It was sort of predictable but worth seeing.

I'm still not sure how Shia Leboeuf has a career. To me he's a non-talented Joseph Gordon-Leavitt.
 
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RJKarl said:
I was surprised and very disappointed in Pain & Gain. I don't read reviews. The trailer and the cast made it look like it would be a caper flick about incompetent crooks with a little humor in it. I thought the combination of Wahlberg, Johnson and Bay had a lot of potential. Boy was I wrong.

It was about a group of stupid sadistic wannanbe criminals who when they made mistakes got worse. It had pretty scenery but that's about it.

I understand it was basically about a real crime and real criminals, but this was an awful story about really bad people. Johnson's cartoonish character was supposed to "humanize" what happened. He didn't.

Make no mistake I like Dwayne Johnson and Donnie Wahlberg, but this movie sucked.

Robert Redford is back to his "power to the people" style in The Company You Keep. It has a cast of actors mostly in their 60s and 70s (Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte, Stanley Tucci, Sam Elliot and even Julie Christie) along with Shia Leboeuf Terrence Howard and bit parts for Anna Kendrick and Brit Marling.

Redford's acting was decent, but his directing was better. You felt like you were in the towns and following Redford's trip from outlaw to its resolution. Near the end some of the shots made you feel like you were in a live Monet painting.

It was sort of predictable but worth seeing.

I'm still not sure how Shia Leboeuf has a career. To me he's a non-talented Joseph Gordon-Leavitt.
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Yeah, he's got The Right Stuff.
 
RollWave35 said:
Pete Collins' 3-part newspaper series on the Sun Gym Gang is an incredible read.

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/1999-12-23/news/pain-gain/

I know that has nothing to do with the actual movie, but I figure I'd link the story that the flick was based on.
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Great articles.

I wonder which studio executive read this and thought that they should take the real life story of murder, torture, and absolute psychopaths and turn it into a comedy directed by the guy who did Transformers.
 
DistrictDeacon said:
Great articles.

I wonder which studio executive read this and thought that they should take the real life story of murder, torture, and absolute psychopaths and turn it into a comedy directed by the guy who did Transformers.
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From what I read, Michael Bay demanded that this get the green light as a condition to doing the 4th Transformers. It apparently cost "only" $25,000,000 to make, which is a rounding error in all the money the studios make from each Transformers movie, so they let Bay have his pet project. I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you to hear that it sucks.
 
It doesn't suck. You just have to take it as separate from the true life events on which it was based. I really liked it. My brother really liked it. RJ is the first person I've heard that hated if so much.
 
Well it is rated at 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. I'm hardly the only one who thought it sucked.
 
I can understand not reading individual reviews, but in this day and age, anyone disappointed in a movie that got panned on RottenTomatoes deserves what he gets.
 
I used Rotten Tomatoes only as a point of reference of me being the only one who didn't like it.

I don't listen to their reviews either. I don't consider their results any more accurate than other reviews.
 
Can you name one movie that was really good that has a score below 50% on rotten tomatoes? 60%?
 
RJKarl said:
Well it is rated at 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. I'm hardly the only one who thought it sucked.
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So its approval rating is one point lower than Obama's.

I'm not saying it deserves an Oscar or that its a blockbuster but for a $25MM budget I thought it was worth the price of admission.

I'm also willing to concede that part of why I liked it has to do with the gym culture aspect of it.
 
Pain & Gain---from the WSJ, "one of the worst movies I have ever reviewed." That pretty much sums it up for me
 
Hmm, I think you misunderstood Pain & Gain. If ever there was a story suited for Michael Bay's filmmaking style it was this one. Johnson's character was supposed to humanize what happened? Huh? He was probably the most despicable character. In a movie about excess and the stupidity of the "American Dream," a phrase that is repeated about 100 times in the movie, most of them with ironic uses of the American flag in the background, Johnson's character was perhaps the most excessively bi-polar, one minute being a ridiculously over-the-top religious nut, the next running a van over a guy's face. As I said, Bay's over-the-top style was perfectly suited for this story, and it served as an auto-critique of his own filmic excess.
 
bigdoublezero said:
Can you name one movie that was really good that has a score below 50% on rotten tomatoes? 60%?
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If the premise interests you, and the trailer interests you, go watch the damn movie and stop worrying so much about what every wanna-be siskel & ebert think. It's a movie not a damn blender, what kind of nutless brain dead life are you living where you need the world to approve everything first before you try it.
 
DeaconCav06 said:
So its approval rating is one point lower than Obama's.

I'm not saying it deserves an Oscar or that its a blockbuster but for a $25MM budget I thought it was worth the price of admission.

I'm also willing to concede that part of why I liked it has to do with the gym culture aspect of it.
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You can't be serious in comparing approval ratings of politicians to like or not like movies.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
If the premise interests you, and the trailer interests you, go watch the damn movie and stop worrying so much about what every wanna-be siskel & ebert think. It's a movie not a damn blender, what kind of nutless brain dead life are you living where you need the world to approve everything first before you try it.
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Exactly. At 48%, there are still a large portion of folks who enjoyed it.
 
RacerDeac said:
Exactly. At 48%, there are still a large portion of folks who enjoyed it.
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You also have to take overall average rating into account. Pain & Gain is at a 5.5, while Oblivion, at 56%, is only .4 points higher on average rating. The percentages can be kind of deceiving. Like with The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers. TDKR has an 87%, while Avengers has a 93%, but they both have an 8/10 avg. rating.
 
WakeFanatic said:
Hmm, I think you misunderstood Pain & Gain. If ever there was a story suited for Michael Bay's filmmaking style it was this one. Johnson's character was supposed to humanize what happened? Huh? He was probably the most despicable character. In a movie about excess and the stupidity of the "American Dream," a phrase that is repeated about 100 times in the movie, most of them with ironic uses of the American flag in the background, Johnson's character was perhaps the most excessively bi-polar, one minute being a ridiculously over-the-top religious nut, the next running a van over a guy's face. As I said, Bay's over-the-top style was perfectly suited for this story, and it served as an auto-critique of his own filmic excess.
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Thank god you were able to understand it and explain it to us mere neanderthals.
 
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