I saw the trailer for this one a few times last year and was intrigued by the notion of a good old fashioned heist movie making a comeback. However, the release date was seemingly pushed back until everyone forgot about it, and it kind of came and went from theatres as a result.
Featuring a fairly impressive run of B-list actors with not much to do (Matt Dillon! Laurence Fishburne! The guy from Scream! Jean Reno!), Armored follows Ty, a rookie security guard who finds himself caught up in a plan by his fellow guards to steal $42 million from their own security firm. And wouldn’t you know that Ty desperately needs that money to support his younger brother and keep the bank from foreclosing on his childhood house, but gosh darn if he isn’t just too morally grounded. He’s also a veteran of the Iraq War and probably reads to blind kittens in his spare time, just so we know who the good guy is. Now really, people attempting to live beyond their means is exactly what tanked the economy in the first place, so I have little sympathy here for someone who can’t just get a damn apartment. Like really, the old chestnut about a bunch of dudes planning the perfect crime and everything going wrong is good enough without piling child welfare agents into it as well. I mean, Ty actually makes best friend Mike “promise him that no one gets hurt”, which is the oldest code in the book for “a shitload of name actors are about to get slaughtered.”
So with the first act establishing what a swell guy that Ty is (and how he needs money desperately), we proceed to the Everything Goes Wrong portion of our program. I know what you’re thinking: “Stealing $42 million in sequential and probably marked cash direct from a bank? What could go wrong?” See, there’s one slight hole in their perfect plan to steal the money they’re carrying and claim they were hijacked: Someone sees them unloading it. There is LITERALLY a scene where Ty has actual blood on his hands as a result. Really, this kid has a screwed up moral compass, as he was perfectly willing to commit grand theft larceny, but suddenly draws the line at murder? He’s really not a likeable character, and I actually found myself kind of cheering more for Matt Dillon’s charming “villain” Mike. Dillon plays it well as a guy losing control of the situation by the minute while dealing with a frustrating punk who’s screwing up a perfectly good plan. Milo Ventimiglia also bugs as a super-cop who senses danger from his hot dog stand across town but then is too stupid to see a guy in the window with a rifle.
Ultimately this is a pretty shallow movie, attempts at twists and turns aside. The only one who gets any significant backstory or development is Ty, and everyone else is a kind of broadly-drawn cardboard cutout. I mean, hell, they had FRED WARD as the crusty captain, and they didn’t even do anything with it! I was kind of hoping that things would go more spectacularly wrong than they did, as they might in a movie with more of a dark sense of humor, but instead it’s just about Ty locking himself in a truck because he’s so heroic. Hey guess what, you already committed a dozen federal crimes just by tagging along with the original robbery, so you’re not such a terrific role model for your brother after all, Ty. In fact no matter how heroic you might have been in saving the dumb cop, conspiracy to steal over $40 million is gonna land you in prison for a lot of years. Plus the ending is pretty abrupt as well, not really giving anyone any kind of satisfaction. Is this the kind of movie where the stupid characters and nonexistent story are enough to detract from the stuff blowing up? For me, yeah. I mean, I’ve certainly seen worse, but Matt Dillon desperately trying to carry this thing on his back wasn’t enough to justify the viewing for me. You can get the whole Ocean’s Eleven trilogy (plus the original Rat Pack version!) in one package for roughly a third of the price of this DVD, so if you’re looking for much better heist movies, there you go.
Bonus features aren’t much help either, as you get three fluff pieces about the making of the movie, plus a commentary track by the producers that seems to think it’s about a better movie than it really is. Recommendation to avoid.
