Awkwardly arriving the exact same day as “The Bricklayer,” with Aaron Eckhart as an ex-CIA agent with the titular dayjob, “The Painter” has Charlie Weber as ex-CIA agent who has taken up … properly, you may guess. This extra humbly scaled actioner likewise finds its uber-tough erstwhile operative reluctantly pressured again into exercise amid a conspiratorial hail of bullets. From that shared start line, Brian Buccellato’s script finds its personal path. However neither he nor director Kimani Ray Smith find a lot credibility or suspense in an uninspired story that additionally options Jon Voight, in addition to Madison Bailey from the Netflix collection “The Outer Banks.” Missing in most departments past respectable pacing and enough technical polish, this forgettable thriller launches in restricted U.S. theaters Jan. 5, and on digital platforms Jan. 9.
Weber performs Peter Barrett, who give up the CIA for the solitary lifetime of an artist within the Pacific Northwest after his spouse Elena (Rryla McIntosh) left him within the wake of an unintentional taking pictures that terminated her being pregnant. Seventeen years later, dwelling below a pseudonym, he’s not thrilled to have been tracked down by teenager Sophia (Madison Bailey), who claims to be their daughter. This is unnecessary to him — however there’s no time to puzzle it out, as his rural house is abruptly swarmed by closely armed brokers with obvious shoot-to-kill orders.
His deadly coaching kicking again in, Peter naturally dispatches all eight deadly intruders, then flees together with his supposed long-lost offspring. They quickly be taught from his outdated company mentor Henry Byrne (Voight) that the goon squad will need to have been despatched out by “somewhat ruthless” youthful Part Chief Naomi Piasecki (Marie Avgeropoulos), although her causes stay briefly murky. With help from flunky Agent Kim (Luisa D’Oliveira), she continues to ship unfriendly hearth in the direction of the fugitive duo, as in the meantime they’re additionally being tracked by a grinning younger psychopath often known as “Ghost” (Max Montesi).
It will definitely emerges that every one this has to do with a top-secret black ops scheme known as Mission Internship, to which all these principals are tied in a method or one other. Its fiendish plot is a QAnon-adjacent paranoid fantasy involving kidnapped youngsters brainwashed to be grasp assassins. That hook brings faint echoes of “The Boys From Brazil” and “The Manchurian Candidate.” With out these movies’ imaginative conceptual raise, nonetheless, “The Painter” by no means looks like greater than a rote shoot-’em-up inadequately juiced by the form of surprising revelations which are all contrived verbal explication.
Such twists arrive en masse in a labored climax, accompanied by extra of the B&W flashbacks which have been sprinkled all through. Whereas director Smith retains issues shifting alongside briskly sufficient, there’s no particular stylistic aptitude to distract you from the narrative implausibilities, occasional groaner traces, or routinely conceived characters.
Whereas most performers are nice throughout the materials’s limitations, principal villains Avgeropoulos and Montesi are notably underwhelming. It doesn’t assist that the movie’s concept of scary habits is having “Ghost” hearken to techno music below headphones. Lamer nonetheless is giving Peter a low-budget “superpower” involving hypersensitive listening to, which implies we get loads of sudden-loud-noise bounce scares. These aren’t good concepts, but they’re the closest the movie involves having any unique ones.
Shot primarily in British Columbia, “The Painter” is competent if unremarkable in tech and design departments. Nonetheless, it does signify a qualitative step up from veteran stunt coordinator Smith’s prior solo directorial characteristic a decade in the past, the cannibal motion comedy “Evil Feed.”
