The Painter 2024 - Movie Review

Charlie Weber plays an ex-CIA agent who has taken up, well, you get the picture. He arrives awkwardly on the same day as Aaron Eckhart's film "The Bricklayer," which has an ex-CIA agent with the title day job. This more subdued actioner likewise finds its ultra-tough former operator grudgingly dragged back into action amid a synchronized flurry of gunfire. From that typical beginning, Brian Buccellato's screenplay takes a new direction.However, neither he nor the movie's director, Kimani Ray Smith, find any tension or plausibility in a cliched story that also stars Jon Voight and Madison Bailey from the Netflix series The Outer Banks. Other than a respectable tempo and some technical polish, this unmemorable thriller is devoid of other elements. On January 5, it opens in a few US cinemas, and on January 9, it becomes accessible digitally. To watch full movie just go to myflixer.

Weber portrays Peter Barrett, who left the CIA to live a solitary life as an artist in the Pacific Northwest after his wife Elena (Rryla McIntosh) abandoned him following an accidental gunshot that terminated her pregnancy. Seventeen years later, living under an identity, he is upset to have been tracked out by a teenager named Sophia (Madison Bailey), who claims to be their daughter. This makes no sense to him, but he doesn't have time to sort it out because his rural home is suddenly surrounded by heavily armed agents with clear shoot-to-kill orders. 

With his ruthless training restarting, Peter naturally dispatches all eight deadly intruders before fleeing with his presumed long-lost child. They shortly learn from his former agency mentor Henry Byrne (Voight) that the goon team was despatched by "rather ruthless" younger Section Chief Naomi Piasecki (Marie Avgeropoulos), whose reasons are first unknown. With the assistance of flunky Agent Kim (Luisa D'Oliveira), she continues to fire on the fugitive couple, who are also being pursued by a smirking young psychopath known as "Ghost" (Max Montesi). 

It ultimately becomes clear that all of this is related to Project Internship, a top-secret black ops program to which all of these principals are somehow linked. The bizarre plot revolves around kidnapped children who have been trained into becoming expert assassins, similar to QAnon. That hook is reminiscent of The Boys from Brazil and The Manchurian Candidate. Without those films' distinct cerebral lift, "The Painter" feels like a regular shoot-'em-up, propelled by the sort of surprising disclosures that are all bogus language exposition. 

Many of these turns appear in a tense conclusion, along with other B&W flashbacks that have been inserted throughout. The story's implausibilities, random groaner lines, and conventionally developed characters are all readily missed due to the lack of distinctive creative flare, even though director Smith manages to keep things going along quite rapidly. 

Within the constraints of the material, the majority of performers do well, but the main antagonists, Avgeropoulos and Montesi, are noticeably lackluster. It doesn't help that "Ghost" in the movie is supposed to exhibit spooky behavior by donning headphones and listening to techno music. Peter continues to receive low-budget "superpowers" from Lamer, such as hypersensitive hearing, which gives us a lot of jump scares with loud noises that suddenly become deafening. Though they aren't particularly brilliant ideas, this is the closest the movie gets to having any original ones. 

The Painter, which was mainly filmed in British Columbia, has passable but unexceptional tech and design teams. However, it is a significant improvement over veteran stunt coordinator Smith's previous solo production, the cannibal action comedy Evil Feed, which he directed ten years earlier.