The Agonizingly Dull John Travolta/Shania Twain Vehicle Trading Paint Is About as Much Fun as Watching Paint Dry
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In the aftermath of Pulp Fiction’s zeitgeist-capturing success, Quentin Tarantino began talking about a prequel spin-off that would have followed Vincent (John Travolta) and Vic (Michael Madsen) Vega during a debauched stint in Amsterdam.
It’s crazy to think that Amsterdam was once revered as the wildest and wickedest of cities because you could buy pot legally there, and now you can re-fill your THC stash during a trip to the gas station.
Like so many of Tarantino’s projects and ideas, The Vega Brothers never happened. It apparently never got far beyond the idea stage.
Travolta and Madsen’s careers overlap in other essential ways as well. Travolta owes his comeback to Madsen turning down the lead role in Pulp Fiction because he was already committed to Wyatt Earp.
Lawrence Kasdan’s 1994 western is half-remembered now as yet another elephantine Kevin Costner movie for dads but also grandpas and great grandads. But at the time, it seemed like a formidable commercial and critical prospect: a mega-budget (over sixty million dollars) biopic starring Costner and boasting a supporting cast that included Madsen but also Dennis Quaid, Gene Hackman, Catherine O’Hara, Bill Pullman, Tom Sizemore, Mark Harmon, Jeff Fahey, Jobeth Williams, and Mare Winningham.
I remember reading a William Goldman book in which he confidently predicted that Wyatt Earp would be the top-grossing film of all time. He was wrong—very wrong. It didn’t even make a profit.
Decades after The Vega Brothers would have blown the minds of Tarantino fiends, John Travolta and Michael Madsen finally joined forces for what can generously be deemed a film.
Alas, 2019’s Trading Paint is a universe away from Resevoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction in quality, style, and prestige. Madsen is grizzled, raspy, and exhausted as Bob Linsky, the personal and professional nemesis of John Travolta’s Sam Munroe.
The film follows suit. For a movie about racing that clocks in at under 90 minutes, Trading Paint is glacially paced and sleepy. It’s the second consecutive direct-to-video Travolta vehicle, after 2018’s Speed Kills, to angrily insist that racing is the most exciting, glamorous, and sexy endeavor imaginable without showing it to be any goddamn fun at all.
The film’s races are low-energy affairs in dimly lit, mostly empty racetracks, but the never-seen racetrack announcers keep insisting, in the blandest and least convincing fashion imaginable, that we’re unbelievably lucky to be privy to world-class automotive excellency.
I was apoplectic that we never get to see the announcers whose bland patter fills the film with empty verbiage. I at least wanted to see who was wasting my time with their inane sentiments, but I never got the chance.
The announcers’ role here is to artlessly unpack exposition, tell us things we already know because they’ve been established through dialogue or action, and mercilessly hype the sport at the film’s core.
Trading Paint can’t make stockcar racing seem more exciting than watching paint dry, but it can insist, through dialogue, that it’s the most amazing, blood-pumping sport in human history.
John Travolta at least sports a relatively age-appropriate wig to play Sam “The Man” Munroe, a salt-of-the-earth Southerner, exceptional father, scion of a racing dynasty, and an all-around great guy.
The Munroes were born to race, but sullen son Cam (Toby Sebastian) tires of living in his father’s outsized shadow and is unhappy with the car his father has provided. So he betrays his father by racing for Bob Linsky, his father’s arch-nemesis.
Like every Faustian bargain, it goes south quickly. The world-weary cowboy hat enthusiast with the razor-blade rasp and aura of complete exhaustion wants Cam to further betray his dad by crashing into him during his big return to racing.
Cam draws the line at imperiling his father’s life. In response, Bob next targets Cam, who barely survives a hellacious crash that puts him out of action for months.
This affords father and son an opportunity to mend fences and come together to defeat a shared enemy. As in Speed Kills and Gotti, there is at least one wildly melodramatic scene where Travolta’s character says that even though he was never a perfect father and had his faults, he always loved his boy and wanted the best for him.
These scenes add nothing to the film beyond canned melodrama, but they play to Travolta’s actorly ego because god knows the screenplay doesn’t have much else to offer him.
I was mildly intrigued by Trading Paint because Travolta does not play a police officer or a criminal in it. That at least suggested that it would be terrible in a way markedly different from Travolta’s other stinkers from this period.
If I can give it the very faintest of praise, Trading Paint is terrible in a way that deviates strongly from Travolta’s cavalcade of Redbox-ready late-period losers.
Even more remarkably, Trading Paint marks the first time Shania Twain has taken on a substantial acting role in a movie, rather than merely playing herself, in the pop country icon’s lengthy, remarkable career.
John Travolta and Shania Twain would be the hottest, sexiest pairing of 1996. Unfortunately for them and audiences, this was just barely released over three decades later.
It would be hard to imagine a less auspicious debut for one of Canada’s most successful musicians. Twain is perfectly acceptable in the thankless role of the blandly attractive middle-aged school teacher who restores our hero’s belief in love after his beloved wife dies.
It’s nice to see Travolta with a relatively age-appropriate love interest, but it is bizarre to see two all-time sex symbols in a vanilla romance that’s about as sexy as Sunday brunch at Cracker Barrel.
Like the long-awaited Travolta/Madsen pairing (the Vega Brothers, in one movie, for the very first time!), the combination of Travolta and Twain fizzles where it should spark.
Trading Paint would like to think of itself as a classic country song in movie form, a Southern-fried tribute to small towns, souped-up cars, the inexorable bonds of blood, and the glory of winning.
Instead, it feels like soulless contemporary country, where the grit and soul have been removed and replaced with polish and professionalism.
More than anything, Trading Paint is boring. Jesus fucking Christ, is it ever boring. Trading Paint never makes it to the 90-minute mark, but it sags throughout, even with several time-filling montages set to forgettable pop and country tunes.
Will the good guys win? Will the bad guys lose? Will the bonds of family and tradition be re-affirmed? The answer won’t surprise you. Then again, nothing about Trading Paint is remotely surprising. It chugs along down the middle of the road at a sluggish and meandering pace, pausing regularly for no good reason at all.
Pop culture is full of performers who confidently made the big leap from albums and music videos to motion picture stardom. That most assuredly is not Shania Twain here. If anything, her performance belongs on a list of the most underwhelming and obscure movie debuts from major international pop stars.
If I might turn Shania Twain’s own words against her, Trading Paint did not impress me much—or at all. Like its Rotten Tomatoes score, it is a complete zero.
Failure, Fiasco, or Secret Success: Failure
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