Pain and Gain victim Marc Schiller has spoken out against the new film from director Michael Bay. One word he used to sum it up: atrocious .
The Huffington Post Live spoke to Schiller, whose book Pain and Gain: The Untold True Story released earlier this year, tells a different story than the upcoming crime caper comedy .
(Of course, that’s just going by the trailers. The movie may be a different experience entirely, but from the sound of Schiller’s remarks, he probably wishes Bay would have stuck to Transformers 4 and left this one alone .)
Schiller told HuffPo that he endured a stun gun and was beaten about the head with a firearm.
He said the pair of Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) and Paul Doyle / Adrian Doorbal in reality (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) — known as the “Sun Gym Gang” — toyed with him using Russian roulette, and “they did a whole list of things, and then obviously, at the end, they tried to kill me.”
“And it wasn’t that funny when they tried to kill me,” Schiller said, adding that the pair “did run me over with a car twice after trying to blow me up in the car.”
Schiller continued: “I was in a coma and somehow I got out. … It wasn’t that funny because I had substantial injuries. … The way they tell it made it look like a comedy.”
Schiller called his book “inspirational” and reminded HuffPo that he wasn’t the only one to endure the torture, “but certain people were killed also. So making these guys look like nice guys is atrocious,” he said.
The real Daniel Lugo convinced a colleague of Schiller’s that the Pain and Gain author stole money from him. (Schiller denied the claim.)
In the film, Lugo and Doyle kidnap the Schiller character, a wealthy businessman played by Tony Shalhoub ( Monk ) and use torture to extort money from him.
(For a full listing of the real crimes, the characters involved, and their fates, The Miami New Times has the scoop — their series served as the basis for the Michael Bay film — or check out this video:)
Do you think the Pain and Gain trailers are “atrocious” in how they depict an actual murder case, or would you rather wait until watching the whole film to pass judgment? Does this affect your desire to watch it when it opens on April 26?