Every Michael Bay Movie Ranked From Worst To Best
5. Pain & Gain
After helming a trio of Transformers movies, Bay switched focus and took the time to direct Pain & Gain, a drama centred on a group of bodybuilders who get mixed up in an extortion ring.
The result is an enjoyable and violent black comedy, with a handful of standout performances (Tony Shalhoub and Ed Harris are both excellent here) and a movie that feels like Bay's personality was filmed and put onscreen; unabashedly American, pumped up, and with a hard-on for those gym-bro/frat-boy male relationships that permeate a lot of his movies and feel awfully cheesy, yet awfully sincere.
Or, to put it another way, Pain & Gain is ridiculous, but thankfully, Michael Bay knows it.
Where his Transformers series faltered by turning a kid-friendly, vibrant toyline into an increasingly bleak, sombre succession of movies - a heavy indication that Bay didn't have a firm grasp on his material - here, he's directed an outlandish tale in a stylistically outlandish fashion, and it works.
Pain & Gain isn't life-changing, but it's serviceable. Bay clearly had a lot of fun behind the camera with this one, and you'll have just as good a time watching it.