Every Michael Bay Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

5. Pain & Gain

Pain & Gain
Paramount Pictures

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.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!