Post by StevePulaski on Feb 28, 2019 16:02:09 GMT -5
Trading Paint (2019)
Directed by: Karzan Kader
Directed by: Karzan Kader
Rating: ★★
More like "trading paint and watching it dry." Despite a smiley Shania Twain in her acting debut and a gruff, unapologetically blue-collar sensibility, Karzan Kader's love-letter to the dirt-track is terribly pedestrian and as unexciting as listening to the Daytona 500 on the radio. And for all you wondering, John Travolta isn't Gotti-level hammy here, but even if he were, that would provide me with something more riveting to discuss.
Kader's Trading Paint has the premise that would struggle to sustain two episodes of a TV show, let alone a feature-length film starring faces you recognize. The low-key, rather ignominious VOD release should send up a red-flag or two, as well as the minimal promotion, and the fact that Travolta has been on a string of wildly uncharacteristic misses for the last couple of years now. But unlike Gotti, John Travolta and Trading Paint don't give you a gut-busting level of badness but instead an eye-rolling level of blandness as the latter tries to disguise tired family drama as something investing by setting it against what amounts to more rugged box-car racing.
Much of the film takes place on a dirt oval track where Sam (John Travolta) and his son Cam (Toby Sebastian, Game of Thrones) have spent a good portion of their lives. After the death of his wife, at the fault of his own moronic ways, Sam has retired from racing in order to shift his focus to getting his son Cam to be even more successfully than he was in his day. A rival racing giant by the name of Linsky (Michael Madsen), however, manages to seduce Cam away from his better senses, which causes Cam to leave his father's shop and chase championships with Linsky and his no-nonsense crew. This brings much shame on Sam, who has taken up a new relationship with the beautiful Becca (pop/country sensation Shania Twain), and Cam's wife, as the two have just welcomed a baby into the world and don't need this kind of conflict.
The lack of subtlety and conventional narrative serve as the most immediate problems in the film. From the jump, Gary Gerani and Craig R. Welch's script doesn't strive for anything more than the obvious. Its contentment with being a family drama about loyalty and the price of success steer it down a path of familiarity from which it never deviates, as if Gerani and Welch were implored to keep things linear. The lack of character depth only makes such shortcomings more evident. Sam and Cam are archetypal southern good ol' boys with a passion for family, breaking bread, and racing, without any other complexities rising to the surface to make them more human. They're essentially southern mascots, comprised of cliches, ala the Bandit, but far less memorable.
Shania Twain may indeed be the only impressive performance here on the guise that her charisma still manages to shine through even when saddled with a generic character. She emotes more than her two prideful male counterparts, and on that note, she gives a more layered performance than Travolta and Sebastian. For a veteran like Travolta, it's not hard to understand why he seems to be sleepwalking through his scenes at times. A man of his caliber deserves much better, and Sebastian appears to be yearning for a greater challenge too.
One commendable moment of humanity comes when Sam's lifelong friend, Stumpy (Kevin Dunn), tells Becca the story of how Sam saved his life many moons ago. Stumpy was essentially caught in a tug-of-war between a gator who got his leg and Sam, who was trying to pull him back to shore by his shoulders; now he has a prosthetic leg, but owes his life to his best friend. If Trading Paint boasted an A-to-B narrative but had more sequences of sincerity and characters bonding in a way that one would leave you to believe southerners and people from small towns do, the film would have a significant amount more merit than it does in its present state.
Trading Paint leaves the average moviegoer wanting more from a story that simple feels like it was written by dipping into a grab-bag of words typically found in the southern/dirt-track racing lexicon and the more seasoned movie-fan bored numb. For a human drama, boredom is a bad thing, but bored numb? That's worse than ditching your father and his body shop to join the arch-rival's up the road, simultaneously leaving behind everything you've ever known. That's just one step too far.
Starring: John Travolta, Toby Sebastian, Shania Twain, Michael Madsen, and Kevin Dunn. Directed by: Karzan Kader.