15 Major Historical Inaccuracies That Undermine Famous Movies
5. Pain & Gain Is Not A Truthful Or Respectful Account Of An Unpleasant Real-Life Case
This hideous dark comedy from Michael Bay, easily the worst film on this list, takes an unpleasant real-life crime story and turns it into a comedy, while making the main characters semi-likable. This was a bold idea, but it was incredibly risky and frankly feels intensely disrespectful to the real-life victims. Bay and the screenwriters weren't capable of pulling this off and as a result this is one of the most unpleasant films in recent memory.
The historical inaccuracies were inevitable since they based it on a series of newspaper articles instead of actually consulting anyone involved. There was a gang of gym members who carried out kidnappings and murder and they were very incompetent in real life, but there are many, many factual inaccuracies involving the details of the crimes. The truly distracting inaccuracy is its presentation of the characters.
The film depicts three primary members of the gang; the gang was larger in real life, with Dwayne Johnson's character being a composite of various different gang members. The film's depiction of the criminals as goofballs and the victims as obnoxious A-holes was pretty tasteless and, understandably, victim Marc Schiller and the families of the two people murdered by the gang were outraged by the movie. In real-life, the criminals were violent sadists, with Anthony Mackie's character in particular being toned down.
The film is already awful, but knowing how disrespectful it is to the victims of the real case makes it even worse.