Furiously stupid in all the wrong places

If there is a car heaven, just think of its features: gas tanks are always full, traffic is staggered into conveniently slalom-ready patterns, traffic lights are eternally green and an extra boost of speed can be found by upshifting into imaginary gears. St. Peter is there and his hands are greasy and a socket wrench hangs out his robes.

This place, this land of vehicular fantasy and whimsy — as magical as Oz and Narnia but with more burnt rubber, flag droppers in booty shorts and the shortest DMV lines ever — is not make believe; it is the world of the Fast and Furious franchise, now in its sixth iteration with Fast and Furious 6, a mindless exercise in automobile stupidity.

Oh yes, this is dumb. But don’t act so surprised. Even if you like the series, you have to recognize how dopey these movies are. I mean, come on, in the last one, they drove Scrooge McDuck’s money vault through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, violating Isaac Newton’s entire body of work in a five-minute road rash of car crashes and crunches. So calling it stupid isn’t really worth debating. The debatable part is this: do you like stupid movies, or do you steer clear. (My only car pun, I promise.)

I must admit, I love corny-bad movies, movies that flaunt the laws of physics, movies that accentuate their weaknesses with even more weaknesses, movies that have a wacky spirit of comic invention. Mostly, though, I like movies that aren’t afraid to be mindless and stupid on their own terms. Russ Meyer knew he wasn’t making the next Citizen Kane when he made Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but he didn’t care. He just threw his heart and soul into that zany movie, and he savored its campy, beautiful awfulness. That’s the way I’ve felt about past Fast and Furious films, including the last two, Fast & Furious and Fast Five. They simply stopped trying to be cool and hip, and they just started being ridiculous in a perfectly delightful tongue-in-cheek crash-o-rama. The clownish spirit we basked in with those movies is mostly gone here in Fast and Furious 6, an uneven and mostly dull action movie about whatever it’s about … something about a microchip, I think. I was saddened to see many of the signature car chases replaced with bland kung-fu, MMA-style fistfights, gunfights and parkour. The cars are almost afterthoughts.

Back are gearheads Dom (Vin Diesel) and Brian (Paul Walker) and even supercop Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) as they wheel around the globe whipping out steering-wheel thrills at questionable speeds. Much of the movie is a close-up of drivers’ feet as the camera makes a visual dissertation on the art of automobile clutching. Other shots included feet on gas pedals, hands on steering wheels and extreme close-up shots of gear shifters. The movie did that funny thing where a driver could get more speed by shifting up again and again. Losing a race? Try 17th gear. Transmission work on these cars must be a headache.

Dom and Brian are told by Hobbs, forever in muscle mode, if they can catch a notorious racecar bandit that they’ll be given immunity for past crimes, grand theft auto and the like. They balk at the pitch because, after all, they’re living in extradition-free countries on Scrooge McDuck’s vault money. But then Hobbs throws in a catch: Dom’s deceased girlfriend, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), may still be alive and working in the bandit’s crew. Suddenly Dom and Brian, ever fascinated by the concept of “family,” are off and running on Hobbs’ criminal investigation. The plot is fairly straightforward, though it all seems a little murky. Like, for instance, why does a military base transfer the sacred microchip out of the base? You’d think the safest place anything would be is smack dab in the middle of a military fort. And then why does the military send two puny little cars to guard the ever-priceless microchip? Again, you’ll either love this stupidity or hate it.

Also, why are there vending machines inside the secret-agent super-lair? Was it impractical to just put in a refrigerator and a cupboard stocked with snacks? Certainly, if they have money for state-of-the-art hacking and tracking eqpuipment, not to mention one-of-a-kind cars, they could afford some chips and sodas. Apparently even people who drive European supercars and pimped-out ’Murican muscle wagons crave Skittles and an Arizona iced tea every now and again. What’s crazy is that when Tyrese Gibson’s character doesn’t have change for his oncoming munchie attack, The Rock shoots the machine’s glass front panel with a bullet that could leave a crater on the moon. In the real world, police have to file paperwork after they discharge their weapon. I realize now I’ve described the scene in full, and my only explanation to that is this: that scene is bonkers.

The car chases are adorably preposterous, but that’s their charm. An early one involves beefed-up go-karts with reinforced ramps on the front — think Mad Max at a Formula 1 race — that send cop cars tumbling over them. A race in London with Dom and Letty is a little too long, but it’s packed with Easter eggs, including its finish line and pit area (the factory on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals). Later in the movie a tank shows up to cause all kinds of trouble. That scene ends with a stunt that’s so impossibly foolish that the audience I was with cheered at the downright audacity of its existence. It really must be seen to be believed.

The final sequence involves a cargo airplane and goes on much too long. The scene does tap into that zany Fast & Furious spirit, though. For instance, how long is that runway? If we use math (let’s say 120 mph for 20 minutes) the runway is something like 39 miles too long. And the whole time, cars are dangling from titanium grappling hook wire, fistfights in the cargo hold, shootouts in the fuselage, and the Spruce Goose-sized airplane is in a perpetual state of mid-takeoff. It’s those scenes that prove how much fun the Furious franchise can be.

The cast certainly helps as well. Diesel, whose voice rumbles like a Harley Davidson with a slower-than-usual idle, is an enjoyable actor to watch work, even if it’s just to spout macho-man lines such as, “I got this one,” or “No one messes with my family.” He and Rodriguez share a scene that’s quite good: she has amnesia so he tells her how she got all her scars. “You got this one when some show-off kid nearly killed you with his car.” “Where were you?” she asks. “I was the show-off kid.”

I enjoyed parts of this movie a lot. The chase scenes. The unbelievably bad stunts. The way the film seemed to flash back and flash forward to other events in the Furious canon. I didn’t like all the gunplay and fistfights; they seemed to drag on for far too long. They also took the film out of its element, which is fast cars doing stupid stuff.

There’s no shame in that formula, so why hide it in a dumber movie?

Lens Flares: The Final Frontiers

There is a suspiciously beautiful madness in the new Star Trek movie that glows more and more obvious the more it races past you. It hit me about midway through: “This is a stupid movie.”

Not to say that I didn’t enjoy it — because I did, immensely — just that J.J. Abrams, newly appointed wunderkind to all your nerdy childhood treasures, seems to think he’s reinvented the wheel with his updated versions of Star Trek. Yes, Star Trek Into Darkness is flashier, glitzier, more action packed, and the most remarkable visual presentation of a Star Trek movie you will ever see. But it’s also a hollow experience. Abrams has taken all the things that people loved about Star Trek and boiled them down, until all that’s left are caricatures of the world Gene Roddenberry invented. Captain Kirk is a womanizing lothario, Spock is a logic-obsessed stickler, Bones is a second-guessing know-it-all and everyone else is a silent extra there to fill the background. Humans are good, Vulcans are gone, Tribbles are props, Klingons are warmongers. Ships exist to serve captains, federations exist to serve admirals, and planets exist so crews can beam each other onto and off them. It’s a courtesy that Abrams has simplified everything, but in the process he’s made his Star Trek universe flat and two-dimensional, a model that will be hopelessly unsustainable unless it can root itself in something other than nostalgia.

It breaks my heart to write that because Star Trek Into Darkness is a rip-roaring sci-fi adventure, certainly on par with last month’s more grounded, more cerebral Oblivion, another hyper sci-fi flick with a distinct style. Into Darkness, like The Dark Knight before it, draws much of its power from a convincingly evil villain, here played by British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, whose child-like face makes for a creepy nemesis. He plays John Harrison, an obsolete super soldier from the Federation’s past who now plots terrorist acts against Earth as retribution for a mysterious cover-up involving bulky space torpedoes.

Hot on the case is the USS Enterprise, once again captained by James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) after a brief furlough. You’ll know his crew: Bones, Uhura, Chekov, Scotty, Sulu and Spock. They all return and they all have issues, so many that the film nearly drowns in meaningless subplots, including one with Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) going through a lover’s quarrel. They eventually kiss and make up in the engineering room in front of the entire engine crew. With so many rules in the Federation, you’d think dating (and sucking face) with a subordinate in front of the warp core would be one of them.

I mention rules because the annotated, footnoted, cross-referenced Federation rules are an overreaching theme in these Star Trek movies. And they have to be to balance out the by-the-books Spock with James “What books?” Kirk. Every piece of dialogue seems to exist to reinforce that the rules are there to be broken and, equally, that the rules bind us all together in harmony. It’s a tug of war that challenges Spock and Kirk, and it’s nice to see the Harrison character essentially cut the rope and send the whole dynamic flailing in opposite directions.

Harrison, as evil as he is, eventually joins the crew in attacks against rogue Starfleet officers, Klingon patrol parties and those pesky Federation regulations. He and Kirk share one of the best sequences: they’re shot out of an Enterprise hatch, through a debris field, to a nearby ship. It’s an impressive scene, with jet packs and visor trajectories, and it’s outdone only later in a scene with the Enterprise powerlessly plummeting into Earth’s atmosphere. Scenes like these prove how valuable Abrams can be as a director: he knows how to pace action, how to play with our expectations, and how to jangle our nerves right up to that rewarding payoff. Of course, it all resembles a Star Wars version of Star Trek, but that’s another issue entirely.

Abrams also has style, which may eventually be his undoing. His kinetic camera movements are dizzying and effective at keeping the movie's momentum. His sets are spectacular, especially the Enterprise with its CGI-less corridors and realistic-looking machinery. Everything is colorful, from the buttons on holographic panels to the department-specific shirts on all the crew members. With sci-fi movies — and movies in general — growing more and more grey, I love watching a film made with an assortment of colors and a visual presence. Other things don’t go over so well, including those irritating lens flares. Certainly some of them are warranted, but every shot flickering with flares is far too much. It’s odd that space ships can travel at the speed of light and can beam people from one place to another in an instant, but a light bulb can’t be made without a polarized filter.

Even worse than the lens flares are the shaky-cam effects and the rapid-fire editing. I’m fighting a losing battle on this point, but it’s one I won’t stop arguing: the shaky camera thing is completely unnecessary, almost as unnecessary as that inexplicable shot of the science officer in her underwear in the loading dock. (Seriously, was the movie testing poorly with men? “Hey, we should add a woman in some lingerie here … uhh, just because.”)

All of this builds to a conclusion I can’t spoil for you, although you may have already seen it coming. I will say this: Abrams chickened out. What he gives us is essentially a non-ending, one that appeases fans and his need for more movies. I wanted some finality, if not to every plot point then at least one of them. Into Darkness, though, climaxed prematurely with earlier, and better, scenes and then spent its final 20 minutes on mindless overdrive. The final ending just fizzles into closing credits. I was disappointed that the story wasn’t taken further, and that it wimped out on Spock’s new-found appreciation of rule-breaking and Kirk’s mismanagement of his ship (come on, does the captain have to do everything?).

I nitpicked a lot of this movie because its smaller errors are obvious and countless, and its bigger ones were frustrating. In the end, though, Star Trek Into Darkness is a terrific movie, even though I liked its parts more than the film as a whole. The action is stellar, the effects are wondrous, and the story kept me thoroughly interested in the Enterprise’s missions. I just wish that J.J. Abrams would find a way to fill his plots with more purpose. It all still seems like lip service to Trekkies.

  

  

  

  

India, magic collide in Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children was directed with a passion that can't be found in the film itself. It's beautifully choreographed and meticulously told, with large sweeping vistas and delicate examinations of India's culture. It's a technical wonder, filled with a majestic sense of scale and scope. But that story — ouch.

Characters frequently die, abandon their loved ones, betray their family members, are exterminated in wars or are left homeless, penniless (or rupee-less) and destitute. It's so relentlessly depressing, that even the final coda — where other movies shovel some good news — can barely eek out anything that resembles a happy ending. Even in the maternity ward at a hospital, that cheery place with all those fresh humans squeaking and cooing behind baby blankets, there is a scourge of bad news involving dead mothers and a baby-swapping maternity nurse.

Midnight's Children, based on the 1981 Salman Rushdie novel of the same name, is best described as a mystical Forrest Gump set in India. Where Forrest Gump shared Dr Peppers with JFK and swiveled his hips with Elvis, these characters frequently find themselves at crossroad events in India's tumultuous history, including its roots in British colonialism, a violent civil war, skirmishes with Pakistan, and India's 21-month state of martial law known as Emergency. The movie sent me racing to a history book to see how and where (and if) the real stories intersected with the movie. (They do.)

The film begins with the main character's grandparents: an Indian woman and a British doctor with a prominent nose. Remember the nose. The doctor has an interesting scene where he must diagnose his future wife's illnesses through a hole cut in a sheet that protects her modesty. First her stomach appears at the hole, then a leg and, embarrassingly, a breast. "One day she'll have a headache and I'll see her face," he says. The story then shifts to their three daughters, whose own lives becomes tangents for other stories.

Eventually, we meet Saleem, a boy born at the exact moment of India's independence. We learn that every child born on that day between midnight and 1 a.m. was born with special magical powers; the close to midnight, the more magic. Some can fly, others are blessed with war and strife, and several are gifted magicians. From this point on, Midnight's Children will occasionally slip into a mystical realm controlled by the snotty nose of Saleem, who can sniffle and stir at the boogers in his nose to convene a telekinetic roundtable of super-powered children. And here begins the movie's most oblique curiosity: never does the magic explain itself in the story. It's just there occupying space. Imagine the X-Men, with all their physics-breaking powers and abilities, in a historical epic that made their powers useless, and they have to take the bus everywhere like normal people. The magic never seems to fit into this movie's complicated plot, which spans 75 years or so across the 150-minute running time.

What was really frustrating was how little affection the picture held for any of its vast field of players. The characters that we can sympathize with are killed off, and the despicable ones live forever. Even worse, Saleem (played by three actors at three ages) can't seem to find his footing within the vast storyline. Forrest Gump skipped inexplicably from event to event because it was an absurd form of irony; Saleem seems to exist only to remind us of his suffering. It's a brutal epic, one that frames India as the world's cultural epicenter, but then wraps it in tragedy and despair, never triumph.

Rushdie's beloved book might explain some of these issues, but as it stands here the film needs some help putting all the pieces together. It pains me to write that, because director Deepa Mehta's directing is quite wonderful. Her eye for detail and observation are stunning, and the little bits of the film — ants on a leaf, a man rowing a boat, a boy gazing at the ceiling, a train dashing through an Indian village — are my favorite pieces of Midnight's Children.

These scenes show us the humanity of a magical land. Unfortunately, they do nothing to help us with this magic-less movie.

Mediocre Gatsby: Pop artist Luhrmann no match for Fitzgerald's lyrical triumph

Baz Luhrmann is known for many things, but subtlety is not one of them, so don’t be surprised when the Moulin Rouge! director steamrolls The Great Gatsby’s delicate charms into a malaise of emptiness and absurdity.

Not that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece wasn’t asking for it, because it was, with its pages and pages of decadent parties, romping starlets and — to use Fitzy’s own words — “… a universe of ineffable gaudiness …” I guess we should all be happy that Michael Bay didn’t direct it with Teen Mom stars in a nightclub with one of those bra-festooned moose heads above the bar. It was rather odd, though, to watch it all in pointless 3D with those stupid glasses dimming the picture and cutting into the corners of the screen. I would have rather seen it projected onto the floor of a roller rink with wheeled feet gliding through the picture.

Don’t say you don’t get your money’s worth, though: every penny of your admission is dumped into a cannon and shot into your face for the film’s entire 142-minute running. It's visual opulence exploding from the screen. The whole thing just screams “summer blockbuster,” right down to the mindless editing and action. The photography is an especially beautiful mess. Luhrmann’s swirling, swooping and spastic camera lovingly and playfully dances around Gatsby’s parties as if its hyper-glance were endorsing the decadence that the book is clearly so cautious about. As silly as much of the film is, and as awful as most of the acting, it’s that thematic disconnect from book to movie that is ultimately the undoing of Luhrmann’s tragically misguided re-telling of Fitzgerald’s classic.

It follows the novel rather closely, even as it jettisons away from the mood and tone of the narrator’s words. The narrator is Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) and we pick up with him at some kind of asylum, where his fits of depression and insomnia have kept him plugging away at his memories of Jay Gatsby, his wealthy world-traveled neighbor on the shores of New York’s West Egg. Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), a virtuosic enigma to Manhattan’s elite, throws these extravagant parties that everyone shows up to without invitations. Everyone except Nick, who gets a hand delivered invite from snappy-dressed butler who gives him access into Gatsby’s glitzy world of epic soirees, sailboats, fancy cars and an endless array of hedonistic fantasies.

But all Gatsby, the man who has everything, wants is Nick’s married cousin Daisy, who lives across the bay on East Egg, behind a dock with a green light that sorrowfully blinks at Gatsby through his bedroom window. This green light is featured in Fitzgerald’s text, and is now universally acknowledged as a metaphor for something desirous but largely out of reach. Luhrmann uses the metaphor the way a chef tenderizes meat: violently with a spiked mallet. By the end of the movie, I was so sick of that green light that escaping the light’s incessant blinking was my own personal green-light moment.

Daisy is played coolly by Carey Mulligan, who seems to drift in and out of the movie like those big gauzy curtains that so frequently blow out windows in what seems like every scene. The book paints her as more of a tragic figure, yet here she’s simply painfully undecided, like a person standing in a grocery store debating between 2 percent and skim. I felt sorry for her, not because she loved her husband — the insufferable Tom Buchanan, played by Australian actor Joel Edgerton —  and Gatsby at the same time, but because she was cluelessly lost in Luhrmann’s ultra-kinetic disemboweling of Fitzgerald’s sumptuous work.

Even worse off is Maguire, whose acting here is as atrocious as anything he’s ever done. I hate to beat up on actors in reviews, but I’m continuously shocked that he stars in so many films, including big blockbusters like this. Every performance is wooden and stale, from Pleasantville to Spider-Man. He just looks so awkward and formal. Listening to him narrate Gatsby — from those first famous lines (“In my younger and more vulnerable years …”) to the intoxicating and perfect last pages — is excruciatingly painful. Luckily, DiCaprio has enough chops to steal the show when he can. His Jay Gatsby is much deeper and layered than I expected, and I never tired of his lightly accented name-calling (“Good night, old sport”) and his peckish obsession over Daisy. He has a rather wonderful little moment of embarrassment with a broken clock that I enjoyed immensely.

The sets, locations and costumes are splendid as well, as is Jay-Z’s anachronistic hip-hop soundtrack, although I would have loved some more era-appropriate jazz and big band music. All in all, though, The Great Gatsby is a mediocre film of a flawless novel, which isn’t the first time that has happened, nor the last. I think Luhrmann got lost in its setting instead of its themes. This is especially clear in an early scene with Nick, Tom and Tom’s mistress. The camera flings through pillow feathers, splashing alcohol, against the silky undergarments of dancers, out a window to a trumpeter, and up into the heavens to admire a city’s beating heart lighting up the night sky. Luhrmann is in love with the world, but not the characters who cry at its foulness. It’s as if he doesn’t really understand the novel enough to comprehend its intricacies.

I just hope the movie, as beautiful and stupid as it is, inspires a new generation of readers to seek out Fitzgerald’s work. They’ll discover that Luhrmann’s film looked fantastic, but lacked the best parts of The Great Gatsby: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words.

Muddled story ruins Iron Man’s last outing

Robert Downey Jr. is so charming as a billionaire robot tinkerer that we’ll forgive him of all his Tony Stark trespasses. That’s the magnificence of Downey: even his duds prove how likeable he is.

Stark is another matter entirely. Iron Man’s fleshy center is not nearly as lovable here in Iron Man 3 as he was in the original Iron Man or in that bloated wonderful mess The Avengers. Before you hammer-type an Avengers defense, I say “bloated wonderful mess” in the most lovingly way possible. Stark is certainly less aloof here than he was in Iron Man 2 — the one where he lost his mojo and then overcompensated for its absence by going on an epic bender — which makes Iron Man 3 a vast improvement.

Still, though, something is off here. Stark seems meaner, and Downey seems bored by it all. I liked all the motor-mouthed patter, the acidy Starkisms delivered in rapid-fire volleys full of snark and criticism. They just seemed to have no purpose or perspective. It’s as if the writers of Iron Man 3 had nowhere to take the character in his final solo outing. (Downey is expected to appear as Stark in the next Avengers movie, but likely no more after that.) Judging by the plot alone, the writers decided to wander and see where it took them. Short answer: to an unceremonious end to the Iron Man franchise.

In a fragile new world distressed by the events in The Avengers, Stark is having some anxiety issues. His blood rushes, sweat pours from his face and his electro-magnetic heart thumps in that gaping sore in his exposed chest cavity. Like another conflicted Tony — Soprano — Stark is having a full-blown panic attack. But rather than dealing with his troubles, the film seems content to just show flashbacks from The Avengers. These scenes are more DVD plugs than plot points because in the end they serve no purpose to Stark’s current dilemma, one involving a shadowy Bin Laden-type character called the Mandarin.

With Stark on the fritz, and his new rocket-jettisoned Iron Man armor still in the prototype phase, the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) upsets the post-Avengers world (aka the post-9/11 world) with a series of terrorist attacks that now only resemble the Boston bombings even though they were filmed long before April 15. I find it curious that the makers of these movies will use real-life terror to rattle us under the guise of entertainment, but then refuse to say anything profound about it all. This kind of disconnection is frighteningly stupid and downright exploitational. Early in the film, one of the bombing targets is the Chinese Theater on Los Angeles’ famous Hollywood Boulevard. The bomb that explodes creates an 8,000-degree fireball that leaves incinerated shadows on the walls. If you’re keeping score, the film has used 9/11, terrorist street bombings and IEDs, and now imagery from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for its brand of fluffy comic fun. I will let you make your conclusions about this imagery; Iron Man 3 offers none.

In any case, Stark jets off in his last remaining Iron Man suit to do some detective work on the Mandarin, his shadowy group of fire-bleeders and on two scientist characters (Rebecca Hall and Guy Pearce) who turn up exactly as the Mandarin starts ratcheting up the tension. A middle section in the film features Stark without a working armor suit, which allows us the brilliant shot of Stark and Iron Man sharing a sofa together. Another scene involves him rescuing passengers from Air Force One after they’ve been sucked out a massive hole in the side of the plane. This is easily the film’s best sequence, though the editing at the end doesn’t really explain how Iron Man saved 14 people when his suit clearly tells him his limit is 4. It’s like a shot was missing somewhere between freefall and touchdown. This sequence is in full daylight. Enjoy it because the finale is all inky and dark, as if to hide the phoniness of the digital effects.

I haven’t yet mentioned Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), who has a much larger role here as Stark’s live-in girlfriend and the CEO of his company. There’s a terrific moment early in the movie when Stark, in the middle of a massive explosion, remotely orders his Iron Man outfit onto Pepper instead of himself in order to protect her from the flying shrapnel. Awe, nothing says "love" like sharing your blast-resistant cybersuit! Tony and Pepper are easily one of my favorite movie couples. They are so genuinely right for each other. And Downey and Paltrow seem to understand what attracts them to each other, and they make it all so playful and effervescent.

Don Cheadle also returns as War Machine, or the Iron Patriot, though he has so little to do it's frustrating to see him sidelined. In Iron Man 2 he was given that heroic wargasm at the end of the film, and it seemed like he would figure more prominently in future stories. Not that I wanted him too, mind you; I would rather have no War Machine at all. But here he only half-exists: they have to acknowledge the character because the earlier films did, yet they never give him anything important to do. And for that matter, where are the rest of the Avengers?! Surely, Thor is back on Viking Plant ordering mead and pounding his fists on intergalactic bar counters, but Captain America and Hulk are probably on Earth. I mean, did they get stuck in an elevator together. Are they stranded in a bathroom stall without toilet paper? The Marvel universe allows all these characters to destroy Loki's alien army, but then it looks mighty conspicuous when they don't all team up again for a villain like the Mandarin, who's blowing shit up all around the world.

Everything leads up to a rather big secret that I won’t spoil, but let me tell you that I didn’t see it coming at all. (Hint: “Sir Lawrence Oblivier.”)The film knows you won’t see it coming, which is why they punctuate the whole scene with a bathroom joke so absurd you have to admire how daring the whole thing is. But as this jolt wears off, Iron Man 3 settles into its last mediocre stretch, with Iron Man batting baddies around as he jumps into and out of his various armor suits. This scene with all the different suits is mildly exciting, but it mostly feels like lip service to the comic fans who can call out the suits by name. By the end of the movie, it didn’t have the presence of a send-off.

The Dark Knight Returns is far from a perfect movie, but even it knew how to handle Bruce Wayne and Batman. And it reinforced its direction with an ending that properly served the Batman legacy. Never at any point did this feel like finality for Iron Man. It was just another episode in what will be a franchise that runs from here to eternity. The formula from here might go like this: reboot, sequel, sequel, reboot, sequel, sequel … continued until Marvel bleeds its empire dry. Ultimately, though, this is why comic books are so hard to get into: the stories never end. They just continue … on and on and on.

I mostly liked Iron Man 3, but it could have done much better. With Downey, Pearce, Kingsley and Paltrow, it certainly had actors up to the task. The writing and story, though, never rise to the occasion. The film tells us: “Failure is the fog from which we glimpse triumph.” And it’s right because there, hazy in the fog of Iron Man 3’s obtuseness, is the first Iron Man showing us the greatness of Tony Stark.

Bay flails at anti-hero worship with Pain & Gain

Having strip-mined pop culture of all its valiant action heroes, director Michael Bay apparently had no where else to go for more protagonists. Then he found death row. And just like that — snap your fingers — his hero worship has finally backfired on him.

If you recall, bombastic adoration of his main characters — soldiers in Pearl Harbor, robots in Transformers, unpredictable cops in Bad Boys, and space drillers in Armageddon — is kinda Bay’s thing. That and his film’s tableaus of hokey hyper-Americana: broken lawn chairs and kinked beer cans, American flags and dusty boxing gyms, greasy garages and candy-colored supercars, old ladies in hair salons and neon-drenched strip clubs. He’s like the Norman Rockwell of the Walmart generation; his work would look right at home on the wall of your nearest Applebees.

Bay has always been an easy target of critics. Nothing personal; I just dislike his movies: the way they’re made, the volume at which they’re screamed at us, the laser-focused intensity jammed into every single millisecond. Pain & Gain, though, stings worse than the others. It’s just so wrong on so many levels. First and foremost, it cultivates celebrities out of its main characters, cold-blooded murderers now on Florida’s death row. Their tales of kidnapping, extortion, murder and dismemberment are rendered here in a whiz-bang high-octane thriller with splashes of comedy. It is the most bone-headedly flawed concept in recent cinema history. Springtime for Hitler was made with better intentions.

Never before have more wretched human beings been the central figures of a movie this upbeat, this colorful, or this preposterously misled. Certainly, movies like Monster or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer asked us to sympathize with deranged murderers. But those were dramas and they never asked us to laugh amid the bloodletting. Even Natural Born Killers — Oliver Stone’s controversial satire of murder and mayhem in the 20th Century — felt compelled to ugly-up the adoration of its murderous rock-star leads. In Pain & Gain, though, Bay continuously glorifies the slapsticky wackiness of his characters’ plights; it’s like an R-rated Looney Tune about evisceration and body disposal. And even after they’ve chopped up two innocent people, Bay still frames his stars in that troubling low-angle perspective, as if to suggest the characters were bigger and mightier than even the screen. Up, up, up the camera looks on small, small, small men.

The movie is based on a series of articles also titled “Pain and Gain” from the Miami New Times by Pete Collins. They are fascinating reads and incredible examples of in-depth crime reporting. The film’s ultimate flaws can’t be found in Collins’ 1999 writing, which only further proves how terrible Bay is with story and script, themselves afterthoughts to spectacle and crude humor. How crude? At one point a character is barbecuing the fingerprints off the hacked-off hands of a dead innocent woman and Bay turns it into a punch line. These gags aspire to be black comedy, but the overall tone is too light, too hallow and too insensitive. And Walhberg’s hushed exasperation plays no different than his demeanor in Ted or The Other Guys, comedies without … oh, I don’t know … grisly murders with horse tranquilizers and a set of free weights.

The articles and the film revolve around the Sun Gym Gang, a group of bodybuilders who preyed on wealthy businessmen in the Miami area. The leader is Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a charismatic and narrow-minded beefcake whose pantry at home is filled with big jugs of powdered protein supplements. Lugo attends one of those get-rich-quick seminars and decides he wants to be a “doer, not a don’t-er”; the first order of business is a kidnapping and extortion scheme. His mark is a rich gym member and Schlotzsky’s franchise owner, Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), who flaunts his cash and says arrogant stuff like, “You know who invented salad? Poor people.”

Lugo and some iron-pumping buddies (Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie) kidnap Kershaw and force him to sign away all his property and cars, divulge all his bank account numbers and spill his secrets for the Sun Gym Gang to pick through condescendingly. This happens over a month, and it involves torture, beatings, humiliation and a rather discouraging scene where they melt his hand in an iron press. The movie frames all this like it’s some kind of wacky Adam Sandler comedy, but keep in mind that Kershaw’s only crime at this point was being a tremendous jerk, which must be a terrible offense in the surreal fantasyland Michael Bay calls reality.

Eventually, Kershaw’s usefulness drained, the gang attempts to kill him, but the poor guy just refuses to die. He ends up surviving and initiating an investigation into the Sun Gym Gang’s bumbling criminal enterprise. Ed Harris turns up later as wise private detective Ed Du Bois, who takes on Kershaw’s case after the Miami Police Department finds it too ludicrous to believe. Du Bois features prominently in Collins’ reporting and I wished the film was shot entirely from his point of view simply because he has sound intentions and Harris serves as the only guy worth cheering on. The female characters have it especially hard, though. The only ones in the movie are hookers, prostitutes, bikini babes at the gym and Rebel Wilson, who apparently thinks about dicks all day long. Du Bois’ wife does have a small role baking a cherry pie. So let’s review: women in Bay’s world are either strippers, nymphomaniacs or homemakers. Lovely.

With women in the gyrating in the background, most of the film follows Lugo and his cohorts as they bop around Miami screwing up crime after crime. The film makes some twists and turns, but eventually some of them end up on death row after they murder a phone-sex magnate and his girlfriend. These scenes are deftly filmed, like a backhoe repairing a Swiss timepiece. At one point Ludo has to take a chainsaw back to the store because he got hair and scalp caught in the chain during the dismemberment. The film actually begs us to feel sorry for him as he deals with Home Depot’s complicated return policy. It’s a despicable sequence, like much of the movie.

I will say this, Pain & Gain looks rather fantastic. But all Bay movies do. Every frame could be a postcard; every sequence a TV commercial. Even the lackluster scenes are visually unique, including one with Lugo and his crew inexplicably counting their haul in a tanning bed, black light soaking into every purplish pore. Bay is a self-plagiarist, though, and many shots seem borrowed from other Bay movies, including that hair salon, with its row of old ladies with their heads in dryers, that last turned up Bad Boys.

He also uses small cameras, probably just high-end GoPro cameras, in locations that larger cameras won’t fit. The idea is nifty, but the cameras have a grainy and noisy look to them, which creates a jarring transition when the film cuts from shot to shot. Overall, though, this is one of Bay’s slickest productions. It’s more visually comprehensible than a movie like Transformers 2, which cut between so many different cameras it was hard to tell what was going on. Bay even uses narration from practically every character to ensure everyone’s motives are kept in check. The narration device worked best in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, though it still has some value here as characters, major and minor, narrate their drama. It has the added bonus of enhancing the storytelling, as vile as it all is.

All in all, Bay should be proud of the look of the film. It’s just the tone and delivery of the story that was unsettling. Somewhere out in the world right now are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends of the Sun Gym Gang’s victims, and I doubt they would find Pain & Gain’s lighthearted thrills and hero worshipping worthy of a giggle, especially considering that Bay directs the movie as if it were a big-budget date movie. Correction: a big-budget date movie about cold-blooded murderers on death row. Bay is simply not skilled enough as a storyteller to frame a movie from the criminals’ point of view. Quentin Tarantino did it with Reservoir Dogs. Michael Mann did it with Heat. Arthur Penn certainly did it with Bonnie & Clyde, whose “heroes” are gunned down in an opera of violence at the end. Bay just doesn’t have the chops to duplicate the feat.

Films can challenge us. They can make us laugh. They can move us. They can startle and shock us. An above-average movie will do these things, but never needlessly. And occasionally they’ll offer some subtext. Pain & Gain’s subtext is rather straightforward: here are some killers, let’s laugh at them as they kill.

That’s not filmmaking; it’s exploitation of a pathetic order. Thanks, but no thanks.