9. Pain & Gain Was Way More Horrifying In Real Life
The Michael Bay film it's okay to like, the director of such bonkers excess as Transformers found a grounded home for his particular filmmaking style in the true story of an organised crime ring formed by a group of down-on-their-luck, idiotic bodybuilders. The film is a creepy dark comedy starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Mark Wahlberg. The true story, a series of Miami New Times articles written by Pete Collins, however, is way more disturbing. The film fuses a few characters together for sake of brevity, creates entirely new ones and underestimates the size and scope of the group. It also toned down some of their more violent actions, although it does include the chainsawing and disposal of human body parts. In reality, the story of Pain & Gain isn't a twisted American Dream it's a bunch of mad muscle-heads who felt they deserved the good life, and murdered a lot of people in truly gruesome manners. That's definitely there in the film, too, but it's more focused on how these idiots bungled their crimes than on them being absolute psychopaths. More scary than funny.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
