Load Bearing Beams

Pain & Gain is Michael Bay’s magnum opus, a razor-sharp dissection of the American id. This movie has it all: Con artistry, prosperity gospel, and drugs, drugs, drugs! It also features career-best performances of Dwayne Johnson, Mark Wahlberg, and Anthony Mackie, and it’s easily Bay’s best movie. Indeed, it’s a look at an alternate career for Johnson where he could play interesting, complicated, vulnerable characters like he does in this movie. Instead, he made a bunch of movies with big cars and/or gorillas.   Still, Pain & Gain is an absolute blast and we had a great time breaking it down, marveling at how much fun it is and how well it predicted what America would feel like in 2025.   Next week: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)   The Summer of Rock is our summer 2025 miniseries covering the movie career of Dwayne Johnson through nine movies, presented in chronological order. Starting with his attempt at crossing over from the world of wrestling, The Rock’s career got off to a bu