For an art plebe such as myself, the name Fernando Botero shamefully didn’t really ring any bells when I went into this new documentary about his life and work, despite the fact that the Colombian painter and sculptor is one of the most lauded visual artists working today. But immediately upon seeing the vibrantly cartoonish figures of his pieces, I clued in, since Botero’s art has taken over the world to such a degree that we all have a subconscious awareness of it.

Unfortunately, this Canadian-produced documentary portrait is typically bland and pedestrian, failing to offer any sort of distinct style or real depth to complement Botero’s striking and surreal visions. As the son of a travelling salesman father who died when he was only four years old, Botero endured a poor upbringing in Medellín to eventually travel overseas to Europe and hone his passion for painting. We hear about his youthful shenanigans, personal artistic influences and runaway success but at a scant run time of 81 minutes, it also rushes through the facts of his life without pausing for much reflection.

Botero ends up mostly being a fluff piece, with no shortage of talking heads (including several of his family members among them) clamouring to talk about how important he is. This is certainly not untrue, but there is also a running observation about how his work has often turned off art snobs for flirting too much with the lowbrow. Yet only one interviewee is contemptuous of his work and even she doesn’t have much to say beyond, “It’s terrible,” before we quickly move on to another member of the Botero clan praising their father for being such a nice person.

To this end, there’s a huge missed opportunity to explore Botero’s modern day resurgence as a part of internet culture, with his “Pope Leo X” painting finding second life as a popular meme (tagged with the caption “y tho”) over the last several years. Since his work is so rife with the possibility of engagement with younger people, the decision to totally ignore this aspect is baffling. I’ll chalk it up to the fact that this is a basic television-quality doc at best, receiving a perfunctory weeklong theatrical run at the Hot Docs Theatre solely due to the fact that it has Canadian money in it.

We do get to see a ton of Botero’s extraordinary artwork on screen, which at least works on a filmic art gallery level, and the movie briefly comes to life when showing how Botero’s work became political with his hometown-inspired Pablo Escobar piece and the disturbingly brilliant Abu Ghraib painting series that brought him renewed notoriety. It’s just a shame to see an artist who has rightfully been hailed as the second coming of Picasso receive a documentary so uninspired.