Like Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis, John Travolta is another former silver screen heavyweight who has succumbed into 'from B to the Z movies.' I don't want to say that all of those movies are awful, but usually, they are. 'Trading Paint' is near awful. Looking at the cast and the story, there was a promise for a much better movie. John Travolta is in good form (although his hairline can make you nervous), and the rest of the supporting cast does their work fairly well. But, the writing is so poor that it seems like they filmed the first draft (or perhaps they only had notes of the writers). Actors did their best, but the characters were paper thin and relationships between them shallow and empty - no real development that would have put some juicy meat over the skeleton of the screenplay. After the opening race, the viewers are suddenly thrown into the dating scene between the main character Sam (John Travolta) and his girlfriend Becca (Shania Twain). The viewers never got to know how these two met, and how many dates they already had (they talked like they had been a couple for a long time, but still didn't know much about each other). At least the chemistry between Wain and Travolta was sizzling enough to keep their romance in the fire. Then there is the big rivalry between Sam Munroe and Linsky (Michael Madsen) that is largely left unexplained. Simply put - the relationships lacked real depth and drama. And racing scenes, unfortunately, weren't very spectacular.
When you don't happen to be in the mood of wasting an hour and a half, or if you are not a huge John Travolta fan (who does fairly well in this trite) then 'Trading Paint' is easily passable. For racing fans, there are many more exciting movies out there, and the dramatic part is not well written/directed either. There are worse films out there, but there are definitely much better ones when it comes to filling your hours with simple entertainment. But the main question was left unresolved - was his car indeed auto-matic, system-matic, hyyyyydro-matic? (I totally stole this joke.)
