Owen Wilson – A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The new movie “Runner” is another example of how Alan Ritchson is the new #1 action movie star. Starting with the Amazon Prime series “Reacher”, Ritchson has now made 5 action movies in the last three years.

The logline for Runner: A former soldier turned elite courier must transport a life-saving liver to a critically ill young girl within hours, but when a ruthless cartel targets the organ, he and his unlikely partner are forced into a deadly race across Australia to stay alive—and complete the delivery.

This idea is a good one, along with adding Owen Wilson (Ben Bishop) and Ritchson (Hank Malone), who rides with Malone to avoid a group of drug cartel criminals who want the extremely rare liver (due to blood type) to a hospital in Brisbane, Australia, to save the life of a child. The action scenes are well done, but nothing we haven’t all seen before. Throughout this film, Wilson and Ritchson have very good chemistry during all the many action scenes, which include car crashes, chase scenes, and the many physical fights that Hank Malone has, dominating the many criminals trying to kill him and Bishop and steal the liver that is stored in a special case to keep it at a constant cold temperature.

The side story is Hank Malone’s own child, who died of leukemia some years earlier, causing him to become an alcoholic, leading to his divorce and his job as a runner, transporting items around Australia. Malone did make progress, earning his AA 1-year sobriety coin, but unfortunately his ex-wife moved on and married another man.

There are some impressive special effects and action scenes at the end of this movie, and a few surprises that I did not see coming, but not enough to turn this from an average action movie into a great one.

I agree with the moderate 69% Rotten Tomatoes rating and give this movie a marginal recommendation mostly for the action scenes.

Screenwriter and director – Brit McAdams probably thought that there was some humor to extract from the long-term PBS show where a quiet talking artist, would create landscape paintings with his unique style of speaking while making it look like painting outstanding-looking landscapes was actually easy to do. The star of this PBS show called “The Joy of Painting” ran on PBS from 1983-1994 and starred the late Bob Ross. This unusual show was somewhat funny in terms of the quiet unusual way Bob would talk with his curly afro-like hair. This ground breaking 1-hour show was one of the very few Art shows to ever be produced for television.

Unfortunately, there is not nearly enough humor for a show like this to carry a 2-hour movie called “Paint” – despite the attempt to parody a TV production this unique. I for one am surprised that this movie idea was ever greenlighted to be turned into a major movie release. This idea is not nearly funny enough to be considered a comedy, and not nearly interesting enough to keep anyone’s attention for a full two hours.

The new movie Paint stars Owen Wilson as Carl who is the star of a painting show on PBS – exactly like Bob Ross’s show that was so popular from 1983-1994. Most of the humor attempts fall flat, as well as the side stories that include some affairs with Bob and some of the women who work on the “Joy of Painting Set”. There are major parts of this movie that are very slow and boring, understandable considering the lack of funny ideas to keep anyone’s attention for anywhere near the full two hours. One area that does work is when Carl loses his job and then his art suddenly becomes very valuable when it seems that he may have died. Other than a few small moments of humor it is hard to believe that anyone decided to make this into a movie and Owen Wilson decided to take this pretty bad part.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for Paint is accurate and low 25% and I agree with this assessment, with a big miss for this film at all costs recommendation.