Pain and Gain, the action-black comedy hybrid about a team of Miami bodybuilders on a violent crime spree that’s baed on a true early 1990s case that opens this weekend, is an impressive chronicle of the persuasive power of American dumbness. That it’s directed by Michael Bay, a man who’s amassed a considerable fortune by purveying the kind of dumbness at which he now takes cockeyed aim does nothing to diminish the considerable, sick charms of the movie. In between the movie’s engagement with male body image and entitlement, its portrayal of the way the American dream can deform like candle wax, crackerjack performances by Mark Wahlberg, Dwanye Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Tony Shaloub, and Rebel Wilson, and the rather provocative question of Bay’s level of self-awareness, Pain and Gain may be the smartest dumb movie of the summer.

The story follows three Miami-based bodybuilders, Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg) and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), who work together as trainers at Sun Gym, and Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), an ex-convict who’s chosen Miami, of all places, to try to maintain his sobriety. They turn to crime when Lugo, who’s obsessed with the results of self-improvement if not precisely conversant with the means of achieving it legitimately—he served time on an investment scam—decides that one of his clients, a businessman named Victor Kershaw (Shaloub) , is living the life that ought to be Lugo’s own. “I didn’t hate him. I just thought it would be cool to see France,” Danny explains to us initially. But his resentments harden into a kind of entitlement, one based in part on the disparity between the amount of time he spends working on his body and the time Kershaw devotes to his own physique. “We’re supermen,” Danny tells Adrian. “Don’t you think we deserve better? Because I do.” After recruiting Paul to their cause, the three men kidnap Victor, lock him up in his own sex toy distributorship, and proceed to torture him until he signs their assets over to them. But while the movie’s plot is a crime story, its themes are self-delusion, incredulity, and their related consequences.

Everyone in Pain and Gain is obsessed with the movies, and one of the film’s running jokes is the way people take the wrong lessons away from their favorite movies. “Michael Corleone didn’t become the Godfather by following rules,” Daniel insists, missing the point that Daniel’s transformation into the Godfather is a tragedy that upsets generations of planning, rather than his actual goal. “He did it by keeping a gun behind the toilet and knowing what he wanted.” “I knew the only place a woman like me could be appreciated in the United States,” says Sorina (Bar Paly), a stripper at the club where the gang likes to hang out. “I saw Pretty Woman.” But her assessment of that movie is that Julia Roberts got a shopping trip by showing Richard Gere her vagina, rather than that she got her way out of poverty and sex work by being appealing and emotionally open. Sorina gets her shopping spree, in part because she doesn’t know to want anything else. And they collapse the distinction between the movies and reality on a regular basis. When Danny wants to reassure Paul that his ideas for kidnapping and extortion are viable, he tells the more naive man “I watched a lotta movies, Paul. I know what I’m doing.” Pain and Gain, to be clear, serves up many of the same vulgar pleasures that have lead its characters astray, from gorgeous, unclothed women, to the sick joke of a small dog chomping down on a dismembered toe, but in a movie that’s partially about about the power of such provocations, it’s hard to accuse Bay of hypocrisy—he’s telling us what works, and challenging us to distance ourselves from our enjoyments.
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Stoner comedies are a venerable staple of cinema, and have been for a long time, but marijuana enthusiasts have tended to hover around the edge of television, particularly on the networks, where they’re more a fodder for jokes than serious contenders for main characters. But as marijuana legalization has become a political reality at the ballot box, pot may move to the center stage on television, too. Entourage producers Rob Weiss, Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson, whose tenure on the HBO sitcom gave them some sense of how to make lighting up a bong, or the possession of marijuana, or a dearth of marijuana, funny, just sold a show to Fox , The Happy Tree, about a burned-out lawyer who becomes a spokesman for a marijuana legalization movement. Whether the show ends up making it to the air or not, and if it does, being any good or not, it raises an interesting question: why haven’t we cracked how to make political procedurals?

In recent memory, we’ve had two effective shows that would meet that description, West Wing and Parks and Recreation. Both of those shows illustrate what makes it harder to do a political procedural than a crime show: the fight isn’t the same every week, and the episodes can’t hit the same satisfying rhythm of discover a body, fix on the wrong suspect, find the right suspect, trial, and verdict. On the national level, the dilemmas on West Wing ranged from bringing a recalcitrant Congress to heel, shutting down an advocate who could make trouble for the administration, deciding whether to go to war, or dealing with an assassination attempt. But the throughline was the power of the presidency and how it could be deployed. On Parks and Recreation, the episodes frequently revolve around event planning and execution, a flexible structure that’s carried the show through everything from sister city visits, to weddings, to reunions of Parks Department directors, to campaign stops.

It’s trickier to come up with that kind of structure for a story about a movement, because the tasks are different when you’re outside of government and seeking power rather than wielding it. That doesn’t mean that episodes can’t be organized around the kinds of events Leslie Knope takes on: movements need rallies, and meetings, and election days, which make for terrific climaxes. But rather than a straight episode-by-episode procedural with little continuity across the course of a season, it probably makes more sense to structure a story about a movement like a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, setting up an elected official, a judge, a ballot initiative, or a commission as a Big Bad, and devoting much of the season to a meeting, a change of heart, a defeat, or a victory. Not all the episodes have to deal exclusively with whatever the drive towards victory is, but that fight will give a spine to each season of the show, without which it would be easy for a program like this to become a baggy, bleary collection of jokes about sparking up. It’s not that I don’t like those. But if you want momentum and stakes for something like The Happy Tree, you have to understand that marijuana isn’t just a matter of fancy Hollywood dealers and Harold and Kumar’s business hippies, and figure out how to make questions of enforcement, cultivation, taxation, and distribution interesting beyond Johnny Drama’s desperation for a dispensary hat.

I was watching the fairly funny trailer for Ted, in which Mark Wahlberg plays a grown man who lives with a crude and belligerent teddy bear he’s had since he was eight:

And I realized it reminded me of FX’s show Wilfred, and not just because both the movie and the show feature adult men who take bong hits with their imaginary friends:

Both Ted and Wilfred are squarely in the tradition of Harvey, the 1950 classic about Elwood Dowd (Jimmy Stewart) a likable potential alcoholic who insists that his best fried is an invisible rabbit of that name (a remake was in the work three years ago but seems to have foundered). In that movie, Elwood’s family considers having him institutionalized or receive medical treatment that will make him stop seeing Harvey, but ultimately decide that they would rather have his kind, imaginative self than a normalized shell of a man. But they have a sharper edge than Harvey does—Ted and Wilfred both cause genuine problems in their human friends’ lives other than making them appear odd, and the show and movie appear more willing to treat these lingering attachments as a sign of real pathology. In that sense, they’re also a somewhat way of moving beyond the valorization of manchildren that’s been something of a staple of pop culture for the last five or six years. These men haven’t just coasted charmingly along. There’s something specific holding them back, and it’ll require a difficult, unpleasant decision to reckon with it.

I’m not usually one to police the behavior of celebrities, but Mark Wahlberg’s recent statements about September 11 are really egregious and deserve a thorough fisking. He told Men’s Journal: “If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.”

First, who knew Mark Wahlberg knew how to fly commercial aircraft?

Second, for the love of all that is holy, do you know nothing about what went down on September 11? When people get out of their seats and start murdering members of the crew, it wouldn’t have been particularly surprising if people were shocked enough not to react until it was too late. And as it turns out, they weren’t. The passengers on United 93, including a judo expert and a rugby player (who may not be as fit as Mr. Wahlberg, but are not incapable people), fought back against the men who hijacked their flight. As it turns out, people with weapons who are determined to die are decent at thwarting the people fighting back against them who want to live. The hijacker at the controls of the plane dipped and rolled to thwart the passengers’ efforts. And he crashed it before they could get to the cockpit.

This is just profoundly disrespectful to everyone who died on planes on September 11, whether they fought back or not. It shows no understanding of their ordeal, or their courage. And it mistakes action movie theatrics, where the fights are scripted and all the participants share an interest in making a great scene rather than finding themselves at deadly odds, for the struggle to live.