Paintball (2009)


REVIEWER RATING: 
5/10


Shot in English, Paintball is the latest genre effort to come out of Spain, a country that has recently started getting quite a bit of notice from fans and Hollywood in general due to the success of films like Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage. Paintball is your basic backwoods survival horror film, except replace a group of young vacationing friends with paintballing thrill-seekers.

The film starts off pretty quickly, as we're already introduced to our leads while they're being dropped off in the field where the games with the opposing team will be held. After 15-minutes of adrenaline-charge faux warfare, things start to become all too real, when someone within the wooded area is using real ammo to off members of the group. Despite their comrades' dying, the remaining survivors press on to the next checkpoint, where they reach a case that contains potentially new weapons to fend against their deadly new foe.

I liked the movie at first and ignored some of the films faults early on, but soon realized it wasn't going to get much better than what we've already been given. For instance, there's absolutely no character development whatsoever, leading us to not care whether or not these key characters make it out alive or not. Then, we've got the paintball killer himself, who only sees via thermal goggles. This results in POV kills completely in this thermal format, which I admit was neat the first time, but after the second, third, and fourth times, you realize that by showing these deaths in this format we're missing out on some potentially gory scenes.

As we near the film's incredibly predictable climax and come to terms with its many plot-holes, we witness the end of what could have been a decent film. Regardless of the films many faults and predictability, it still managed to keep my interest, so I didn't feel as though I completely wasted an hour-and-a-half of my life.

With the exception of the leads being action-oriented thrill-seekers, this is your clichéd and predictable backwoods survival horror film. The hunter/killer in the movie isn't anything special, although only seeing via thermal vision proved interesting at first, but quickly became tedious and a cop-out of potentially gory scenes. Don't bother with this unless you're big on the backwoods sub-genre.
OVERALL: 
With the exception of the leads being action-oriented thrill-seekers, this is your clichéd and predictable backwoods survival horror film. The hunter/killer in the movie isn't anything special, although the use of only seeing via thermal vision proved interesting at first, but quickly became tedious and a cop-out of potentially gory scenes. Don't bother with this unless you're big on the backwoods sub-genre.


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