Armored | Crime/Thriller | rated PG-13 (L, V) | starring Columbus Short, Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno, Fred Ward, Skeet Ulrich | directed by Nimrod Antal | 1:28 mins
The newest member of a team of armored truck drivers facing financial constraints and the possibility of his house and troubled younger brother taken away is brought in on a plan the drivers have devised to rob 42 million dollars from the truck they are to transport. But when a witness throws a wrinkle in the plan and someone ends up dead, Ty (Columbus Short), the newbe and former Iraq war veteren tries to turn the tables on the rest of the guards (including Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno).
Director Nimrod Antal made a genre splash with the terrific little slasher flick Vacancy. Vacancy was a movie of maximum efficiency, getting in and out exactly when it should have. Antal uses the same fat-free approach here with Armored (even the titles are quick and efficient) proving that what works for a slasher flick doesn’t work for a heist movie. Chiefly it’s the material Antal has to work with. Vacancy had a crisp, nimble script that contained everything it needed and nothing it didn’t. Armored on the other hand is a movie that’s universe would naturally extend beyond the frame of the picture, but ignores all for that and as such is full of holes, undeveloped characters and lacking any plausible motivations.
Antal does his best to power through the script, polishing it off as a disposable B-grade action flick. It might have worked to, but a B-movie has a goofy level of fun to it that Armored lacks. There is a ridiculous level of seriousness to this thing. Dillon, Fishburne, Reno and the rest of the security guards snap to the evil side at the slightest wiff of trouble in their plan. It’s so loony it makes you wonder how they could have passed a psych exam to become guards in the first place. Equally annoying is Ty, an inhumanly good boy scout who does the right thing in a childishly single-mindedly way. Odd given that the movie spends it’s exposition setting up reasons for him to go for this plan or at least feel compromised in favor of it.
And if you’re thinking that a movie about an armored truck heist might have some vehicular action, think again. Much of Armored takes place in an abandoned warehouse set that could have just as well been the shooting home of a dozen direct-to-DVD blowoffs (I’m thinking about you, Unknown). The action breaks out of this setting once for a truck-to-truck chase that literally goes in a circle and back into the warehouse.
It’s not a bad idea too. Security guards pulling off a heist of their own truck. I wish the plan hadn’t fallen apart so soon and we got to see more of it. With more creativity this could have been a confined chess game thriller along the lines of Panic Room. But the script doesn’t think it needs to be coloring in any of the characters and Antal is not the guy to juice the set pieces for suspense. Even though it feels completely unambitious and downright incomplete at the front and back end, I’ll still give it to Antal – unlike these criminals, the movie sure gets in and gets out.