When their winning streak begins to fail, legendary father and son racing duo Sam (John Travolta) and Cam (Toby Sebastian) have a falling-out. A rival racing giant takes advantage of this rift and offers Cam a lucrative opportunity racing for the adversary. Cam accepts and the gap between father and son grows even bigger. Engines rev and sparks fly as the two are set against each other in an ultimate high-stakes race — and the most dangerous competition between father and son.
John Travolta has been stuck in straight-to-DVD hell for a while now. He hasn’t had a good role in a long time but recently was panned for playing John Gotti. Gotti’s deplorable reviews became quite the spectacle for memes and internet fodder. It had a bizarre marketing strategy a la Trump-like campaign. The PR team exclaimed, “fake news” for the zero percent of critics finding anything positive to say. Travolta also finally admitted he’s bald which is a step in the right direction, but now he’s back in a real clunker of a movie, “Trading Paint.”
In “Trading Paint,” he plays Sam, a grizzled racing coach working with his son Cam (Toby Leonard). Cam is a car racer that has all the talent but not the best equipment for his car. He has a somewhat friendly racing rivalry with Bob (Michael Madsen) who is the local car dealer and cocky big shot. Bob wants Cam on his team much to his father’s chagrin. With exposition going full throttle the entire movie, everyone keeps telling Cam that he can’t trust Bob. I really wish dirt track racing was as fun as some people in the South claim it to be.
It was kind of a treat to see two “Game of Thrones” actors reunite, especially since I’m pretty sure one killed the other in the show. Luckily, Kevin Dunn pops up once in a while, he’s such a reliably great supporting actor and the more scenes with him, the better. He also knows how to properly talk like a genuine southerner, I was impressed Travolta didn’t overdo the accent. Some of the “Southern” accents are pretty atrocious. Shania Twain is the love interest (because why not) but a huge opportunity missed by the filmmakers not having her sing a song over the credits about Alabama dirt track racing.
For the racing scenes, director Karzan Kader seems to take lots of technical methods/cues from early 2000s movies or clunky Peter Berg direction with his snap zooms. Some exciting races really could’ve helped boost the movie with its predictably uninteresting screenplay. The writers must have just copied and pasted from so many other sports stories. Even the dang announcers at the race track are literally laying out exposition with cringe-worthy lines like, “you can’t write stuff this good!” I realize it’s a small town but do the sports announcers just gossip about all the drivers? Pretty sassy boys! As a critic, I always hope for at least an entertaining picture and this was just a boring mess.
Available on Blu-ray™ (plus DVD & Digital), DVD, and Digital May 21st
