You know how there are just some movies that, despite their obvious story pitfalls or stilted dialogue, are nearly impossible to stop watching when they come on TV? They usually run on channels like TNT or USA, and without fail, they seem to air during finals week. These are movies like “The Fast and the Furious” or “Gone in 60 Seconds.” They have no business being as amusing as they are, and audiences — particularly college students — will tolerate their cinematic flaws for their pure entertainment value. By no means are these great movies, but they’re certainly good enough. Just in case anybody was wondering, “Armored” is decidedly not one of those movies.
The film follows the story of beleaguered military veteran Ty Hackett (Columbus Short, “Cadillac Records”), who returns to the U.S. and finds a job as a guard for an armored truck security company. Both his parents have died, so he is left to care for his teenage brother as he tries to keep the bank from seizing his house. The other guards on his crew convince him to steal the millions they are responsible for transporting — playing it off as an ambush — with the promise that nobody gets hurt.
But “Armored” is not about the economic or psychological hardships a soldier faces upon returning home. Instead, it’s 90 minutes of glorified security guards stumbling over their own hare-brained scheme to undermine a system that is obviously far beyond their own comprehension.
The film’s plot mechanics are implausible at best, often ignoring realistic outcomes in favor of unlikely developments that attempt to dramatize the storyline. Making his debut as a screenwriter, James V. Simpson is far too reliant on convenient quick fixes like radio dead zones that prevent contact with the police or mysterious, unspecified causes for Hackett’s economic situation. It also seems highly unlikely that an armed security company would not have a contingency plan in place to protect itself from its own employees, especially when its own employees are so tragically feckless.
Many of the action sequences are patently ridiculous, using odd close-ups on guns or boots to distract the audience from the blatant impossibility of the plot. Panic sets in early when a shotgun-brandishing, semi-drunk Laurence Fishburne (TV’s “CSI”) shoots and kills a homeless man who had been inhabiting the abandoned warehouse where the guards-turned-thieves had planned to hide their loot. The slapstick doesn’t stop there, though, as minutes later one of the guards gets his thumb slammed by a sledgehammer while attempting to bust open the door of his own truck. And if that’s not enough, an explosion in the second act leaves one guard completely ablaze and another with a charred and blackened face not unlike one you’d see in a Yosemite Sam cartoon.
Most regrettable, however, is the employment of legitimate professionals Fishburne and Matt Dillon (“Old Dogs”) into a screenplay that denies them any opportunity of a noteworthy performance. The quality of dialogue, quite frankly, is somewhere between that of a cheap porno and a Japanese special-ops video game. There is at least one gratuitous joke that uses a pistol for a phallic symbol, and the plot is rife with brief Mexican standoffs. Misplaced profanities abound, and the guards seem convinced they are not involved in a selfish theft but rather an intricate military operation in Iraq or Afghanistan. One guard, after approximately 45 minutes as a burglar, even turns suicidal.
There are hints of various underlying messages throughout the film, though none of them are developed enough to be remotely relevant or convincing. The drastic measures Hackett and his cronies are forced to pursue amount to a simplified take on the difficulty of economic mobility and an exaggerated sense of despair. Hackett ends up seeing the error of his ways and thwarts the other guards, saving the life of a wounded policeman — also shot by Fishburne — along the way. This earns Hackett an ambiguously grand reward from the same company who previously was unable to give him more shifts, presumably allowing him to save the house. It seems as if a little bit of bizarre heroism is all America needs to solve the credit crisis.
1 star out of 5.
