Armored

Director Nimrod Antal likes to stage thrillers in minimal or confined spaces. His last film was Vacancy, a sometimes-effective horror film about a married couple who check into a sleazy motel, only to find out too late that the entire building was an elaborate death trap built by some deranged killers to lure in victims. That movie used its limited space within the motel quite well, and managed to keep things moving. His latest film, Armored, is an action thriller set mainly around an armored truck sitting dormant within an abandoned factory. There's less for Antal to work with here, both with his setting and the screenplay.

Armored is another one of those "perfect crime" movies, where a group of friends join up to pull off what they think will be the perfect crime, only to have things spiral out of control quickly, to the point that they are all turning against each other. The friends this time are a group of guys who work for an armored truck service. They transport money through the city every day, and seem to be regular guys. That's when one of the friends (Matt Dillon) comes up with a way that they could stage a fake hold up, and make off with the over $40 million they're set to transport the next day. The newest guard on the team, Ty (Columbus Short), has hit hard times. He has a house with two mortgages, and his younger brother Jimmy (Andre Kinney), whom he takes care of, might be taken away by child welfare. Ty is desperate, and agrees to the plan. They pick up the money, take it to an abandoned factory, stash the cash, and make it look like the armored trucks got held up while in route to the destination.

That's the plan, anyway, until the men discover a homeless man living in the old factory. One of the other guards in on the plan (Laurence Fishburne) shoots the man, leading Ty to realize that what they're doing is wrong. He locks himself within the truck, trying desperately to contact anyone outside. Dillon's character and the other men in on the job try to get inside the truck, so they can silence Ty and take the remaining money that's inside with him. Complications arise. A local cop (Milo Ventimiglia) has his suspicions aroused by the sounds coming from within the old factory, and begins snooping around. So now the men have to figure out how to get rid of him, too. Ty finds various ways to avoid capture. He even manages to sneak out of the truck once or twice without being seen. I can see all this be thrilling in a different movie, but it never manages to build to any tension here. We don't care about the characters, because we don't learn anything about them. One's a gun-nut, one's always reading a Bible, and the other men in on the job are pretty much identified only by the name tags on their uniforms.

Unfortunate, since there are some good actors here. Jean Reno turns up as one of the men, but is given no character to play. His big moment, when he goes to Ty's house to kidnap Jimmy in order to lure Ty out of the truck, is kept mostly off screen. Aside from Ty, Matt Dillon's character is the only one who gets any real development. He's best friends with Ty during the opening half hour, so I guess we're supposed to be shocked by how coldly he turns against him when things start to go wrong. It never builds to anything, though. There's no real confrontation between the two, except for a pair of pointless and unexciting car chases around the factory grounds. The movie itself also seems edited, as if it were originally shot as an R, but was tampered with by the studio to get a PG-13. I can't imagine a huge teen draw to a movie like this, so I don't know why they felt the edits were necessary.

Regardless, Armored is the hardest kind of movie to review. It's not really terrible, and it never offends, but it also doesn't stand out in any way. The acting, the action, and the script itself are so painfully average that you wonder why the filmmakers bothered. It's the kind of movie that leaves your mind the second it ends. Theaters these days are charging too much for a movie like this.

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