Based on its loony concept—a bunch of paintball nuts go into the woods for a fun but hardcore game and end up getting picked off one-by-one when the game gets too real for comfort—director Daniel Benmayor and screenwriter Mario Schoendorff’s Paintball (2009) could have been any number of things.
It could have been a misguided and incredibly condescending critique of the self-indulgent and absurd nature of simulated violence or a pastiche ala Severance that winks to its audience at the excesses of its ludicrous premise or even a stupid slasher movie with no real ambition other than being wicked cool and gory. Instead, Benmayor and Schoendorff opted to take a lil from column A and a lot from column C, making a straight-faced thriller with an underdeveloped political subtext that’s as aggressively hard to watch as it is to conceptually to imagine working. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Ala Hostel, Benmayor dabbles with broad social commentary but makes nothing of it in the set-up to his film. After they’re brought to the woods in hoods that even one of the characters admits looks like that “Abu Ghraib shit,” any hint of a cogent critique of socially attenuated acts of violence drops to the wayside. Halfway through Paintball, we find out that our group of hapless paintballers, featuring the loud and really annoying dude, the only sympathetic guy who happens to be black, the opportunistic asshole, the nervous breakdown chick and the final girl, are being picked off by a “hunter” paid by rich men and women in the shadows to pick them off in order to determine the most suitable candidates for some program we never find out about (I know, shocking, right?). He goes rogue, again for reasons we never are clued in on and starts taking out the players for kicks. If you’re thinking that Friday the 13th would have been a much better film if Jason Voorhees played paintball and killed people because he was paid to do it, Paintball should be giving you goosebumps right about now.
Not so much for this guy. Benmayor can’t decide whether to celebrate or put down virtual displays of death, shooting almost the entire film with a hyper-nauseating shaky cam that denies the pleasure of even the film’s most satisfying acts of gratuitous violence, which, realistically, are what any stupid slasher aspires to be remembered for. He takes a stab at shaming the viewer by rarely showing actual blood but instead showing it indirectly through the “hunter”’s grey night vision or the ubiquitous neon orange paint splatter. But then he has the characters stumble upon a case of special red paintballs and the question of whether he’s trying to be serious or just uptight become irrelevant as it’s clear that Paintball’s too much of either.