Michael Madsen in TRADING PAINT (2019)

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American actor Michael Madsen who played Mr. Blonde a.k.a. Vic Vega in ‘Reservoir Dogs‘ died of heart failure on July 3 2025. He played tough-guy roles in ‘Donnie Brasco‘ and ‘Sin City‘ but is best known for his roles in Tarantino movies. In a lesser known role, Madsen played opposite John Travolta, a.k.a. Vincent Vega from ‘Pulp Fiction‘ in the 2019 racing movie ‘Trading Paint‘. It was the only time the Vega brothers from the Tarantino universe met on screen.

Travolta played racer Sam Munroe, a local legend at the dirt-track in Talladega, Alabama. His arch nemesis is Bob ‘Lead Foot’ Linsky played by Michael Madsen, who owns a successful Ford dealership in the area, which helps buy the best equipment and fastest race cars. Lead Foot Linsky wants nothing more than to defeat his racing rival, and comes up with the ingeniously evil idea of hiring Sam’s long-suffering son Cam to drive for him. The lure of a fast race car and the possibility of winning, instead of always DNF-ing, is too much for young Cam to pass up on.

As the son betrays his father, the movie turns into a Southern soap opera. Sam fires Cam from the family tow-truck business, so the youngster is forced to work for bad-guy Bob at the dealership; and now that old ‘Lead Foot’ Linsky has little Cam under his thumb, he tries to get the son to wreck the father during a race. The movie grasps at tropes like a near-death accident, and the bed-side reconciliation at the hospital.

The premise actually sounds interesting, but even race cars can’t save this dud. Reviews called the movie ‘Travolting‘ and it currently has a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Rookie director Karzan Kader was in way over his head, even fighting with his crew. The camera operator repeatedly broke the 180 degree rule, where the camera must be kept to one side of an imaginary line between two characters (except in French new-wave cinema). And the sound mixing is so bad that dialog between characters can’t even be heard over background noise and wind. Really just amateur hour.

John Travolta deserves plenty of blame too! Between his atrocious Alabama accent and terrible toupee, every scene made audiences cringe. He had absolutely zero on-screen chemistry with love interest (and still-hot-for-her-age) co-star Shania Twain. No idea how he screwed that one up!

Almost by default, the high-water mark of this film is the performance of mean Michael Madsen and his cowboy hat as ‘Lead Foot’ Linsky. His character is an old racer, trying hard to win another championship before his sell-by date. His jet-black dye job and pretty Russian mail-order girlfriend seem like exactly the stupid things a man does when trying to hold onto fading youth. Madsen delivers his lines in that characteristic growl, making even small talk sound intimidating. Dude was a master!

But if one specific reason had to be pointed out as the reason this movie is so bad, it would have to be the racing. Late-model dirt-oval racing is about as obscure as it gets. The cars look all weird and distorted, and only hardcore race fans would even understand what they’re looking at, and why the cars are all crooked. The slip and slide across the dirt track, but they’re not all that fast. Plus, the high angles used to shoot the action in this film makes them look really slow. And that’s the death knell for a racing movie.

It really is too bad that the long-rumored Vega Brothers movie, with Madsen as Vic Vega and Travolta as Vincent Vega, never happened. Too many years passed, and the actors got too old to make a prequel (remember, Vic dies in ‘Reservoir Dogs‘ and Vincent gets all shot up in ‘Pulp Fiction‘). So, for fans of the actors and their characters, the scenes they shared in ‘Trading Paint‘ will have to suffice.

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