A stock car racing legend is drawn back to the dirt track when his son, an aspiring driver, joins a rival racing team.
After watching John Travolta's latest film, The Fanatic, I had to go and see what else he has released recently. Trading Paint is such a film. Starring alongside Shania Twain, Michael Madsen, Kevin Dunn, Toby Sebastian, and Rosabell Laurenti Sellers, Trading Paint is a family sports drama that is set in the world of the Super Late Model League at Alabama's Talladega Short Track "The Hornet's Nest".
It doesn't take long for the film to reveal that it has a low budget, and a relatively new director (this is Karzan Kader's third feature film directorial). For a film that advertises itself as a racing film, the actual racing scenes are very roughly edited, with extensive use of close-ups, creating a false representation of speed and energy. On the few scenes that we see wide shots, the actual lumbering speed of the vehicles, driving around an empty stadium less than exciting. If perhaps they could have had shots from the drivers perspective, and added in a CGI audience then this might have had a more engaging atmosphere.
Trading Paint also does a poor job at explaining the sport to those that haven't seen it. We are shown that it involves racing in these specifically customised cars, but the layout of the track, the speeds travelled, the number of laps required, the rules of the match? Everything is a mystery. While the Late Model Super League is effectively the setting of the movie, it could be replaced by near enough any other sport without affecting the film. This is all about family drama.
The family is composed of Sam "The Man" Munroe, and his son Cam, portrayed by John Travolta and Toby Sebastian, who compete in a sport against a rival team headed by Linsky (Michael Madsen). It takes less than five minutes before every member of the audience knows exactly what the conflict in the film and the eventual resolution will be; the story is as formulaic as it gets. Likely restricted by the short runtime of 87 minutes, several extra elements are added into the film, but none receive a pay-off or are given the time to take it in. The film is more like a highlight reel than a fully cohesive emotional drama. What should be a highly emotional moment, is soon forgotten as they rush into another roughly edited mess of a race.
The use of narration to dump exposition on the viewer is rampant (or to be more specific, the exploitation of the commentators), and is a common issue with the film. Again and again, the viewer is told about conflict and tension, but very rarely are we shown it. At which point we might as well be listening to an audiobook. This is not only an issue with the story but also among the actors themselves. None of the couples or family members has any sort of chemistry. The most convincing performance comes from Stumpy (Kevin Dunn) whose backstory was tacked on in an unusually forced scene right before the climax.
The entire structure is unbalanced. It creates conflict, and then never brings it up again. Antagonist's motivations are poorly conveyed. It spends over an hour building something up, to only rush through to the end with no suspense or tension built up prior. What makes Trading Paint so frustrating, is how poorly thought out the screenplay is. It's as if they used the first draft, and started shooting before the script was finalised. There are elements of the backstory that could have been adjusted to create a much stronger emotional story and allowed everything to be explained in one go, rather than constantly flashing back to bits and pieces of an incomplete memory.
Trading Paint is a watchable movie, but there is nothing spectacular about it. When the take away message from the movie is "Shania Twain looks absolutely amazing for a 54 year old", you know that the film is a lemon.