THE PAINTER - Mark Reviews Movies

The Painter, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 4, 2024

The Painter is about a CIA operative with super-human hearing, which developed after he was caught up in a terrorist bombing that killed both of his parents as a child. He paints on the side, by the way, which is how he got his codename. There are probably a dozen or so more appropriate nicknames for the guy, but one has to assume they were already taken by similar characters in other movies like this one or that they simply don't possess the offbeat marketing potential of this name.

If you've watched any action movie or thriller in the past decade, you've almost certainly seen just about everything that director Kimani Ray Smith brings to the table with this generic action thriller. That alone doesn't make a bad movie, of course, but it certainly doesn't help in this case. One can see exactly what Smith and screenwriter Brian Buccellato are attempting with this material, in terms of its action and its gradual development into the foundation of a possible series featuring sort-of superheroes. In trying to imitate what others have made work in the recent past, the filmmakers only display their limitations.

As a made-on-a-tight-budget action movie, though, one could do much, much worse than this one. For one thing, the premise is simple, straightforward, and just silly enough—although nobody seems to recognize that last fact, unfortunately—to possess some promise.

We meet Peter (Charlie Weber), the aforementioned CIA agent with extraordinary hearing, as his boss and adoptive father Byrne (Jon Voight) gives him his latest assignment at a diner. He's supposed to retrieve stolen government documents, stored on a heartbeat-monitoring smartwatch, from someone, and it's quite convenient for us that these two men, who have known each other for multiple decades, discuss Peter's abilities and their shared history for most of this business meeting. Also, Peter's pregnant wife Elena (Rryla McIntosh) calls beforehand, so we get that vital information, too. The opening credits barely finish before Buccellato awkwardly crams every bit of exposition we need into a few minutes of screen time.

This is clunky, obviously, but the continued rushing of the plot does eventually give the material a sense of momentum later. It at least keeps us from thinking too long or too hard about how very little of the actual plot, which takes place 17 years after Peter's mission fails and the couple loses the baby as a result, makes any sense.

Peter finds himself alone in a small town in Oregon, where he paints, often waxes nostalgic for Elena (lingering a bit too much on the two having sex, which makes us wonder if we should give the guy a couple minutes of privacy), and only ventures into town for the essentials. Then, Sophia (Madison Bailey) shows up looking for Peter. The teen says she's Elena daughter, he's her father, and that her mother is missing. A suspicious Peter tries to stay out of it, but when a group of armed men raids his cabin (They hilariously hide their association with patches over a tell-tale insignia), he realizes it's time to do something.

The rest of this is wholly routine. Peter slowly uncovers a conspiracy within the shadowy areas of the secretive government agency. CIA director Piasecki (Marie Avgeropoulos) sends various operatives—including the murderous Ghost (Max Montesi), who seems to have hyper-sensitivity hearing, too—to find him and a data drive that Elena sent her ex. There's a lot of moving back-and-forth between places in town, where helpful locals have exactly the necessary skills to keep the plot going, and it's interrupted by the occasional fight or shootout.

The fights are the stuff we know too well now, in which Peter uses his pistol as an extension of his fist to fatally punctuate a string of blows. The choreography, though, feels as half-hearted as the flashes of Peter's super-hearing (He primarily notices that men with guns who want to kill him are trying to kill him with guns). If Smith sets up a promising shot to capture the action, the director cuts it short before we can appreciate whatever movements might have been on display. The attempt to mimic what has become a dynamic style of cinematic fisticuffs, in other words, ends up looking like a series of hasty calisthenic exercises.

There's at least some effort here, though, in the action and the movie's appearance, which doesn't look nearly as cheap as the production must have been. Smith and cinematographer Ryan Petey light for mood instead of simply for coverage, even during the climactic showdown in an abandoned factory—that favorite locale of on-a-budget filmmaking. The Painter is far from good, but it could have been much worse.

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