The felonies fall apart due to phenomenal stupidity - and audiences are supposed to laugh at the extreme amateurishness of this band of beefy crooks.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Dec 4, 2020

Adds up to more pain than gain.

| Original Score: 2.0/4.0 | Sep 19, 2020

A tonally erratic and consistently irksome true-crime farce that plays out like a GoodFellas for Dummies.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 11, 2020

It might sound wrong of me, but Pain & Gain could be one of Bay's more decent watching films.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 16, 2020

Like watching a Day-Glo roid-rage explosion that will pump your pecks at the same time it shrivels your nards.

| Original Score: B | Jul 9, 2020

It has genuine moments of comedy, which are swiftly undercut by off-putting violence.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Apr 11, 2020

Director Michael Bay (war epic Pearl Harbor, 2001; five Transformers science-fiction movies, 2007 to 2017) does what he does best with this based-on-a-true-story comedy: He overstates.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 2, 2020

Incredibly silly and over-exaggerated, Pain and Gain offers very little in substance. But if shameless entertainment is more your thing, indulge away.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 21, 2019

Bay may be working with humans, but he's still treating them like robots.

| Aug 13, 2019

Bay's trademarks are there - the loud music, the slow-motion spin, the outlandish action moments. But this is also a movie with plenty of dark humor and a cast not afraid to be the butt of the joke.

| Apr 10, 2019

Bay's cold militarist aesthetic is perversely appropriate in Pain & Gain; the men treat themselves as hardware they can simply build up, so the film treats them as such.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 2, 2019

You may or may not laugh, you may or may not like the characters, but you won't be bored and you will exit the theatre amazed, if not actually stunned, by what unfolds here.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 26, 2019

...registers with all the smoothness of a lumpy protein shake going down a sore throat. Yes, there is plenty of Pain and questionable Gain for Bay's revved up farce of calisthenics cretins.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 17, 2018

If you want a dark comedy with no boundaries, Pain & Gain is one you need to watch.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 1, 2018

Even one of The Rock's best performances cannot save the film from Bay's own excess and this is not one I will recommend to paying audiences.

| Original Score: 3/10 | Oct 10, 2018

Only half-right.

| Aug 30, 2018

There are so many up-angle, slo-mo, 360 camera pans that it starts to feel like every actor is standing on their own personal Sit 'n' Spin.

| Oct 21, 2017

For [Michael Bay], storytelling exists only to justify senselessly bashing some big shiny noisy stuff into other big noisy shiny stuff till your ears bleed for mercy.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 5, 2017

It's just a piece of raucous vulgarity whose greatest virtue is the presence of Wahlberg and Johnson. They're amusing and oddly likable as two amoral, reprehensibly violent dopes.

| Jul 11, 2017

The most shocking thing about the new Michael Bay film is... not the orange, grunting criminals pumping a) iron, b) fists and c) other people, but the gradual realisation that this could be Bay's most intellectual film yet.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 16, 2016