Paintball (DVD)

Paintball is a tough film to review, as it’s very good and yet awful at the same time. The film opens with a group of multi-national folks getting ready to be dropped off in the woods for a game of renegade paintball (which is like normal paintball, but lasts longer and demands a few survival skills).

This being a slasher flick, no sooner have they been left in the middle of nowhere but someone starts shooting real bullets at them, and then slowly begins picking off the players one by one using a variety of grisly means.

But who is the killer and why is he hunting the people for real? These and many other questions are pretty obvious from the moment the movie begins. The film is far from original and has a screenplay that feels as if someone fed keywords like ‘paintball’ and ‘heat vision camera’ into an automatic slasher script computer programme and this was what got printed out.

In the lengthy and rather interesting ‘making of...’ featurette on the DVD, the cast and crew talk about the importance of the characters to the film, but there’s so little set-up (not to mention that half the time they’re all wearing masks to protect their faces from paintball bullets, so telling who is who is virtually impossible) that it rarely seems more than a bunch interchangeable people running around and then dying. There’s little to let you know or care who anyone is, other than that one of the blokes is particularly unpleasant. Oh, and another is a token black person, but other than that you could pretty much shuffle them up halfway through and nobody would notice the difference.

While it sounds like I hated this film, as I mentioned in the first sentence, while it is awful, generic and pretty dumb, there are aspects to it that are excellent. Spanish director Daniel Benmayor films most of the movie using long takes and hand-held cameras to give it an almost documentary feel. While many who’ve tried this have failed miserably, Benmayor has an incredibly dynamic way of shooting things that feels immediate, technically brave and unexpected. Some of the single shot work is supremely well done and during these moments I was absolutely on the edge of my seat, purely because of the verve of the filmmaking. It brought to mind the way some of the tracking shots in Children Of Men were thrilling, not just because of the technical expertise involved, but because they bring an odd sense of reality to what you’re seeing.

Benmayor has an impressive touch with action and also with the horror. Most of the gore scenes are shown in first person perspective through the killer’s heat vision camera, so rather than claret red blood spurting, you have the bright whiteness of hot liquid spraying across the scene. Most of these are also done with little sound, which is far more effective and creepy than you’d think.

It really does leave me in two minds about the movie. Fans of horror/action should appreciate the sheer filmmaking vitality on show here, but at the same time it’s difficult not to be annoyed, frustrated and slightly bored by the incredibly generic plot, the cut-out screaming characters and the fact that such a lot of filmmaking talent was wasted on such a subpar screenplay (although to be fair, there are a few well written moments towards the end).

I think Benmayor really is a name to watch out for in the future, because if he can handle character and plot as well as he can construct dynamic action sequences, he should do pretty well for himself.

Overall Verdict: Excellent filmmaking skill just about makes up for a slightly tedious join-the-dots narrative full of interchangeable screaming people, who are simply there so they can be lined up to die.

Special Features:
‘Making of...’ Featurette

Reviewer: Tim Isaac