I can’t help but feel that there’s a much better film trying to escape the story of Pain and Gain. There are so many ways that this twisted tale tells of the corruption of the American Dream and the greed that lies at the heart of man. Combine this with the fact that the antagonists are bodybuilders and you have all kinds of layers to explore; the decision to chose the surface over depth and the perversion of trying to climb the ladder of success by stealing someone else’s life. You could make an amazingly layered movie here.

Or you could fill it with penis jokes.

Filmed by Michael Bay, I was under no illusions that this was going to be a complicated, multi-textured look at modern day avarice, but I still can’t help but feel a sense of disappointment. Not that Bay does a bad job with the film. After all the shit he’s made, here, finally, is a genuinely entertaining movie. But that’s all it is - an amusing two-hour diversion full of titties and knob gags.

Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a musclebound crook who lands a job at the Sun Gym in Miami. He excels in his position, boosting membership and making his clientele very happy. There’s nothing he won’t do to help business - he’ll even wax the body hair off of fatties. But a fire burns in him. He wants more. He wants more money.

Lugo is kind of a half dunderhead and half genius. His criminal plans are idiotic but yet he’s still able to pull off something remarkable - he’s able to kidnap a man, torture him and steal all of his assets and move into his house without raising any suspicions. He’s the next evolutionary step of Dirk Diggler. Dirk was a 100% dumbass while Lugo is hovering around the 60% range.

One of the funniest scenes is when the gang first tries to kidnap Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub). Dressed in ridiculously skimpy army fatigues that show off all their muscles, they approach their target’s house but then run away like frightened children once they spot that a family gathering is taking place. All the while ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ by Coolio is playing in the background.

And then when the gang finally do grab Kershaw they’re dressed in alien and samurai outfits. They look completely idiotic.

Up to this point, the film is silly and amusing, but then once the torturing takes place, you kind of have to question the tone of the movie. In reality, the real victim, Marc Shiller, was abused and tortured for a whole month. Sure some dark humour can be had with this but the real-life ordeal was incredibly brutal. Here the edge is taken off of it. Kershaw is portrayed as an annoying prick and it kind of feels like the filmmakers want you to feel sympathy for the criminals. How does that work? They kidnap the guy, they get him to sign away all of his money and property, and then they try and kill him. How can you have any sympathy for these guys? The simple fact is, you can’t.

And then Michael Bay’s weird homophobia rears its head. The gang takes Kershaw to a warehouse full of sex toys. So everyone seems to be waving a giant dildo around. In reality it was just a regular warehouse. I’m not quite sure why Bay feels the need to shoehorn as many yucks into the film as he can. This sequence isn’t improved at all by stupid, low-brow humour. This is the sequence when you’re supposed to finally realise how horrid and despicable these people are.

The humour is far more successful in sequences such as the aborted hospital assassination attempt. Somehow Kershaw manages to avoid being killed and then becomes the gang’s target when he turns up at a Miami hospital. There’s just one problem...the gang can’t find their way around the hospital and can’t locate his bed. The humour here is entirely appropriate - these guys are morons.

But it’s very disappointing that the film decides to stray so far from the truth of the real life events. One of the gang is turned from a 140 pound weakling into The Rock! And then the murder of Frank Griga (a Hungarian immigrant made good) is portrayed as almost accidental when he was actually beaten to death because he tried to fight back from a kidnapping attempt. And then you have a completely random action scene where The Rock steals money from an armoured vehicle and then gets his toe shot off. It’s clear that Bay is uncomfortable going so long without having any action and so he decides to insert this sequence. Again it makes the criminals look like bumbling, loveable lugs. Oh, look at this buffoon. Look at the scrapes he gets into!

And then another gang member has a bent penis and continues to steal money so that he can pay for his dick injections - he has erectile dysfunction. Again, this is kind of amusing but it’s not the truth at all. The gang kept on stealing because they were greedy pigs.

The film even goes so far as to have Kershaw personally apprehend Lugo at the end. This is Hollywood bullshit of the highest order. The victim did not take down the bad guy and a nice, clean revenge was not had.

But despite all these problems, I still enjoyed the movie on a base level. I kind of think, though, that my enjoyment was in spite of Michael Bay rather than because of him. The story is so outlandish and ridiculous that I’m just pleased its out there, even if its in a highly bastardised form. And even though he often flies wide off the mark, occasionally Bay gets something right. A great piece of dark humour occurs after the Griga murder. Adrenaline pumping after the killing, Lugo decides that he has to ‘get a pump’ and so begins furiously lifting weights. This is what the film needed more of. It needed less dick jokes and more of this ridiculous, clueless narcissism. These guys weren’t loveable buffoons. They were evil, selfish assholes. They were constantly focusing on themselves - so much so that other people were just barriers to the wealth they wanted to acquire. Their victims were just bodies to be thrown aside like used dumbbells once they’d successfully got their pump.

The Lovely Bones sees Peter Jackson returning to Heavenly Creatures territory. His latest film deals with adolescence and murder, and once again it allows his imagination to cut loose. But while Heavenly Creatures featured a fantasy world that was the creation of the characters, The Lovely Bones spends a lot of time in purgatory and heaven.

I wish I could say that the sequences with the dead Susie Salmon are engaging and well realized, but they get submerged in an avalanche of CGI. Landscapes continually change and Susie waltzes through her new world but at no time does the environment feel tangible. It never feels like you could reach out and touch it. But at the same time it doesn’t feel otherworldly. It’s a bunch of poorly rendered, idyllic locations on earth that are supposed to resemble heaven because of their perfection. But rather than go to the real places and film, Jackson instead uses lots and lots of greenscreen – and bad greenscreen at that.

Some of the imagery is also trite. There’s a bit where Susie and her friend come to grips with their new reality and begin enjoying themselves. They prance through fields, pretend they’re famous and even play on a floating planet that is about as big as a wrecking ball. The last image in particular looked ridiculous. All of a sudden it was like I was playing Super Mario Galaxy – the visuals are exactly the same.

The purgatory/heaven scenes also aren’t helped by Susie’s friend – a comedic Asian girl. Her performance resembles a titmouse that’s inhaled helium – she jitters back and forth while squeaking in a baby voice. It’s cringe-worthy.

Another risible character is that of Susie’s grandmother. Again she’s meant to provide some light relief, but she just made me roll my eyes. She’s a shallow drunkard with a heart of gold – the kind of woman who makes her grandchildren do chores for her while she naps with a glass of bourbon in her hand. People like this aren’t secretly wise and they’re not endearing. They’re losers and they’re windbags. They don’t have golden nuggets of information to share with you in your darkest hours – they just want to raid the liquor cabinet. And there’s even a scene where the grandmother does just that – while giving advice she searches the cabinets for booze. It’s meant to be endearing but the character is far too shallow and glib to generate any warmth.

Going back to Susie, though, the film is more successful when the dead girl interacts with the real world. There’s a nice scene where her father sees a candle and the reflection in the window differs from the reality he sees before his eyes. He senses that it’s Susie’s spirit trying to communicate with him. And there’s another scene where a dead rose blooms in his hand and he suddenly knows who the killer is. It’s in these scenes where the fantastic feels like an organic part of the story, rather than an excuse to indulge in dodgy CGI.

Another moment I enjoyed was when a local girl sees the spirit of Susie running through the street at the point that she’s murdered. It’s one of the few really good visuals in the film. Compare this with the moment where the dead Susie sees the reflection of her lost love in the lake. Hackneyed and schmaltzy, it kind of reminded me of a moment in Bitter Moon – however, in that film, I think the moment was played for laughs.

But while Susie’s interactions with the real world mostly work, there’s a truly execrable scene near the end. You see, Susie was in love with a guy called Ray and this Ray bloke is now friends with the girl who saw Susie’s ghost as she was being murdered. So they’re hanging out and then Susie’s spirit possesses the other girl and Ray and Susie kiss. It’s incredibly silly – Ray suddenly sees Susie in the other girl’s clothes and then she lays on the bed and asks him to kiss her. Even though she’s meant to be about fourteen she looks about twelve (he looks much older). Thankfully it’s not as icky as the equivalent scene in the novel but it still doesn’t work. I mean, how fucked up is it that a girl gets possessed by another girl and then gets boned? Couldn’t that be considered rape? It’s certainly not romantic.

Speaking of the adaptation, the murder here pales in comparison to the scene in the novel. What makes the murder so jarring in the book is how brutal it is. I mean, most of the book is pretty awful but the murder scene is superbly written. It doesn’t hold back and the murderer even rapes the poor girl. But the worst detail of all is the fact that the killer, to shut her up, shoves the girl’s hat in her mouth – a hat that has a jangle bell in it. The equivalent scene here, though, is sanitized – in order to get a PG-13 rating they’ve taken away the rape and taken away the jangle bell. They’ve made it far less shocking and thusly reduced its impact – the sense of outrage and injustice isn’t as intense as it was.

The filmmakers have also reduced the complexity of the relationship between mother and father. In the novel the mother has an affair with the police detective who leads the investigation. Here she just goes off because she can’t cope with her daughter’s death. To be fair, the affair didn’t really work and was terribly written but at least it was an attempt at adding some complexity to the story. Here, though, the filmmakers keep everything as simple as possible. I guess they thought it was a better idea to focus on Susie prancing about in a crappy CGI environment than to show how complicated grief is.

But it’s amazing how the film can be so long and yet the story can be so incredibly thin. Once Susie is killed, very little happens. There’s only one real suspense sequence – Susie’s sister suspects Mr Harvey of being the murderer and breaks into his place in order to find some incriminating evidence. Would you believe it, he comes back while she’s in the house and chases her. In order to escape, she jumps out of a window and seemingly badly injures herself. Oh no, he’s going to catch her as she writhes about on the floor! But when he closes to about a foot away from her, she jumps up and manages to outrun him. It’s incredibly badly choreographed.

I also think that the ending is incredibly anti-climatic. Just like in the novel, Mr Harvey is trying to pick up a girl so that he can kill her and an icicle falls and kills him. It’s divine justice and it’s supposed to show that what goes around comes around, but it’s an unsatisfying way of dispatching the main villain. Firstly it seems far too offhand and secondly, it’s dishonest – there’s no karmic justice in the world; shitty people get away with things and if they’re brought to justice it’s because they either fucked up or people worked hard to apprehend them. You can’t count on icicles falling from the sky.

Beware the trees, the bushes, the blades of grass and the shrubbery for they shall wreak a terrible vengeance. Beware the wind, too, for it shall be the vegetation’s chariot and shall spread death all over the land.

The Happening features many lingering shots of trees and bushes. It also has a high frequency of scenes where people run from gusts of wind. Thrilling the film isn’t, but silly it is.

In his latest film, M. Night Shyamalan tries to tap into our fear of an ecological disaster, but his movie is so ham-fisted, so badly written and so woodenly acted that it ends up being an unintentional comedic tour de force. M. Night has really outdone himself this time.

The film begins with a couple of women in Central Park. They talk amongst themselves and then suddenly everyone around them stops. Then one of the women begins to look confused. ‘What page was I on?’ she says like she’s summoning the spirit of Captain Kirk. And then she stabs herself in the neck. Hmm. Awful acting and ‘ominous’ shots of trees as someone…absolutely…must…kill…themselves. Yeah, it’s not scary.

Immediately following this scene is a sequence where people throw themselves off a building. We start with a bunch of construction workers and then bodies begin to fall around them. It tries its best to tie itself to the terror of 9/11 but the horror is constantly undermined by the ridiculous acting. The head construction guy, rather than go through any sort of disbelief, which I guess would be the normal reaction, seems to cry almost immediately. And then as he looks up and bodies rain on him, he says in hushed tones, ‘God in heaven.’ Who talks like that? Only people in Shyamalanland. For some reason he tries to make every piece of dialogue seem incredibly profound - instead it comes over as corny.

However, there are greater moments of silliness. One of the best features a man who lies down before a massive lawnmower and lets it run over him, splattering lots of blood all over a beautifully manicured lawn. Yeah, did no one think that this might look ridiculous? Oh no, not a giant lawnmower lumbering very slowly towards an incapacitated man! Such visions haunt my dreams. That and the thought of breaking my spine in a flower-watering incident and having malicious squirrels stuff nuts up my anus until I explode.

But even more sniggersome is the scene where a man gets his arm ripped off by a lion. Okay, so this has a more believable bend to it, as many a crazy bastard has tried to make ‘friends’ with the wild animals before. But here the horror is immediately diluted by the way the scene is filmed. Alright, so we have Mark Wahlberg talking to the young daughter of a friend of his and he does his best to cheer her up. He even succeeds. But then some stranger next to Markie Mark taps him on the shoulder and shows him a video on her iphone. We then see grisly footage of a lion ripping a man’s arm off. Yeah, don’t worry kid, everything will be alright. You’ll just either stab yourself in the head, javelin into a minefield, crucify yourself with a nail gun or rip your belly open and have vultures feast on your innards. Nothing bad is going to happen. Smile that smile again!

Another death scene that had me guffawing was the one where John Leguizamo dies. He’s trying to rescue his wife, and he drives off with some strangers in a Jeep, but then everyone succumbs to the toxins the plants have released. We see the Jeep stop and then it speeds towards a tree and people go flying through the windshield. However, Leguizamo survives the crash and slashes his wrists. Again, any potential horror is undermined by the way the crash is filmed. It’s speeded up! It looks like something out of The Cannonball Run. And because Leguizamo’s character is such an idiot, I found myself beaming when he cut through his cables.

However, I think the pièce de résistance comes near the end. Wahlberg and his idiot wife hide in the house of a mad old woman. She spouts nonsense and behaves irrationally and then she gets infected by the toxin. We then see her enter a trance and start circling the house from the outside. Okay, so this is the one unsettling moment in the film. It actually has a bit of tension. But then the woman appears at the window and headbutts it, a shard of glass sticking out of her eye. But this doesn’t kill her so she walks to the next window and headbutts that one. The wind then rushes into the room and Markie Mark has to run for his life. The scene, like most of the film, is insane, and unintentionally hilarious at the same time. Never mind Shyamalan’s heavy handed attempts to preach to us (our self destructive instincts are going to kill us and our planet!) – just watch the nonsense that is a mad old lady committing suicide by trying to destroy her glazing.

But just to show out of synch Shyamalan is with his audience, take the scenes where he tries to generate real laughs. There’s one scene where Wahlberg is in a room with a plant. He almost shits himself and then begins talking to it, saying that he only wants to use the toilet and that he’s trying to send out good vibes. He then touches it and realises that it’s plastic. I almost wanted to cry, so inane was the laboured attempt at humour and so amateurish the acting.

And Wahlberg is horribly miscast in this film. He’s meant to be a Science teacher. Fair enough, Wahlberg is okay when he’s cast properly (basically he has to either play a moron or a thug). But a Science teacher? Every time he talks scientifically he gazes into the distance, like someone on the far horizon is holding a massive idiot board. Either that or he’s trying to concentrate and he needs to somehow relax his facial muscles so that he can reach inside his mind, scratch his brain and remember his dialogue.

But then at other times he changes his inflections. Normal statements suddenly become questions. It’s like Shyamalan accidentally italicised his dialogue when he sent it to the printers.

However, Zooey Deschanel, who plays Wahlberg’s wife, turns in an even more embarrassing performance. Her character is a complete airhead and demands a horrid death – maybe she could take her mobile phone, connect it to a charger, stick it in her vagina and pee herself so that she dies of electrocution. But no, she bumbles her way through the film and gets through unscathed. She doesn’t even lose bladder control. And to add insult to injury, these horrifying events solidify their marriage. Once again traumatic events strengthen a rocky union. What a load of bollocks.

The end leaves the two main characters remarkably content. Never mind the fact that they saw many people commit suicide. Never mind the fact that one of their best friends slashed his wrists. Never mind the fact that two children they befriended got their heads blown off with a shotgun. No, that means nothing. These events made them grow as people. The Happening was a good thing.

But of course, this wouldn’t be a Shyamalan film if it didn’t have a sting in the tail. At the very, very end, after the crisis is over in America, France gets attacked. The film ends with a bunch of Frenchies about to kill themselves. Can we look forward to a sequel where men in striped shirts, riding bicycles with onions around their necks, ride in unison into the Seine? One can only hope.