In the mid-2010s, Michael Bay broke from his long-standing practice of making chaotic and juvenile escapism to helm two chaotic and juvenile exhumations of the American Experiment. One of these was 2016’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, headlined by a roided-up John Krasinski. The other was the subject of this review, 2013’s Pain & Gain, headlined by a roided-up Mark Wahlberg.

Neither film really offers much in the way of penetrating insights into what’s gone wrong both in and outside the homeland. But both work well at least as raw, primal and relatively apolitical cinematic screams of acknowledgement that something has indeed gone wrong. Pain & Gain is the more entertaining of the two due to it not taking itself quite so seriously and featuring one of The Rock’s best performances.

Pain & Gain is based on the real-life story of the Sun Gym gang. Composed of a group of body builders, the gang became mired in all of sorts of criminal activity throughout the Miami area in the 1990s, including extortion, kidnapping and even a murder or two. The Sun Gym gang was headed by Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg), who joined forces with Adrian ‘Noel’ Doorbal (played by a beefy Anthony Mackie) in addition to Carl Weekes, Stevenson Pierre and Jorge Delgado, who here are distilled into a composite character by the name of Paul Doyle (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson).

Working together, the body builders targeted folks like Marc Schiller (Tony Shalhoub), who is named Victor Kershaw in the film, a gross, rude, belligerent yet wealthy gym patron. Their subsequent kidnapping, torture and extortion of Schiller eventually provoked the interest of retired private investigator Ed Du Bois (a cool, collected Ed Harris), who then worked with the police to track them down.

Although it’s technically a period film, Pain & Gain should be commended for how its premise centers the rage and resentment many Americans were feeling around the time of its release. Premiering in the shadow of the financial crisis and Obama’s anemic recovery, far too much mainstream American entertainment at the time seemed to want to paper over the deep wounds percolating in the body politic. Bay’s film also deserves plaudits for how it ties that resentment not just to material realities (Wahlberg’s Lugo mentions how he can’t deal with having to wear shorts to work for the rest of his life) but also the founding myths that have always propped up this sad mess of a country.

Throughout the story, for instance, Lugo routinely talks to the audience in voice over and ties the art of body building to the story of America. The thesis seems to be that body building, like America, offers a clear, tangible output for what you put into it. You may experience pain while working hard, the film says, but you can gain at the end of the day in a way that you can see and feel.

The trouble for Daniel, Adrian, Paul, and certainly for the Sun Gym gang’s many victims is what happens when the relationship between pain and gain breaks down on a macro-economic level. Further problems arise when you are unsatisfied with what you’ve gained. We see this play out in the scenes following the gang’s attack on Schiller. They quickly put his extorted resources to work, burning through cash and other assets until, inevitably, they need to begin planning their next score.

As is expected with someone like Bay, this is pretty much where he leaves things. His diagnosis of America’s problems isn’t wrong, per-say, but he rarely takes things beyond symptom-level. Nowhere do we get the type of analytical insight into the psychological mechanisms driving the aberrant behavior of the Sun Gym bros. Also missing is any type of credible alternative prescription. Bay attempts, half-heartedly I would argue, to position Du Bois as the foil to gang’s insatiable desire for wealth and prestige, specifically the simple, loving relationship he has with his wife. But this is only alluded to and never serves as a satisfying counterweight.

Even if Pain & Gain remains aloof thematically, however, it contains enough raw entertainment value to compensate. Positioned as a black comedy, the film is quite funny in parts, with much of the comedic value coming from the Rock. Long before he exhausted the public’s goodwill with his allegedly egotistical on-set behavior and disgusting paychecks for schlock like Red Notice, Johnson was a reliable fountain of cinematic charisma. You can smell what the Rock is cooking in films like Pain & Gain, as his Paul is not only the most likeable of the gang but the funniest.

A born-again Christian and uncontrollable coke head, Paul is a colorful character that stands alongside other strong Johnson performances like Boxer Santaros in Richard Kelly’s much-maligned Southland Tales from 2006. The actor seems to delight in playing a walking trainwreck of a man whose vulnerability and desire to be good is completely derailed by addiction and a predilection for violence.

There are times, of course, where Pain & Gain‘s embrace of comedy doesn’t work, or at the least, produces a tonal imbalance. Nowhere is this more self-evident than in the severity of the violence the Sun Gym gang doles out, which is quite extreme in parts. Bay treats this brutality in such a devil may care way that it is uncomfortable to watch. On one hand, it’s refreshing to see a film that doesn’t seek to moralize too much in its critique of violence. But the fact remains that it’s hard to keep chuckling when someone is nearly burning to death or getting their head partially run over by a van.

None of this is of course shocking coming from Bay, who has never seemed to fully shake his penchant for destroying buildings, bodies, and everything else on-screen like a little boy—often with ZERO concern for the in-universe consequences. But it underscores how his commitment to exploring this provocative and potentially rich story is not really serious. And while there is a lot of enjoyment to be found in the antics of someone like Paul and the other body builders, this deficiency means the film remains a lightweight.