Armored, bad, but not that bad...

Armored

Director – Nimrod Antal

Staring - Matt Dillon, Lawrence Fishburne, Jean Reno, and Columbus Short

MPAA: Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense violence, some disturbing images and brief strong language.

Armored is an easy to watch, formulaic, action/heist film that somehow still manages to have a few twists and turns that make up for shoddy dialogue, and a formulaic plot. Armored is a basic film with average action, a decent plot, and a marginal climax. I would give it a 6 out of 10. It was gracefully short, and so was not intolerable.

My brother, my wife, and I all sat down to what we figured would be a decent little action film. And while we were not blown away by the films set up, we were pleasantly surprised to find that there were enough twists to make the film an enjoyable, if not below average, action/heist film.



Stomp the Yard’s lead, Columbus Short, takes his place next to action stars Laurence Fishburne and Jean Reno as the hero of Armored. He is a war veteran of Iraq and it is implied he was well decorated. He is now home in the ghetto taking care of his little brother working with his godfather Matt Dillon as a security guard driving armored trucks. Behind his back the old-timers, Dillon, Reno and Fishburne, conspire to steal $42 million dollars, by stashing the cash and covering their track, from their own armored car. Columbus Short goes along with the plan until things go disastrously wrong and Short holds half the cash and himself barricaded in an armored truck looking for a way out.

From there we see a series of deaths, a few car chases and the other necessities to a “B” average action flick, or in this case “C” average. I do enjoy a good heist film, and this one was not disappointing at that angle. What didn’t really work was the fact that the script was pretty poorly written and the makers of the film didn’t bother to do anything terribly interesting in the film. All the characters were pretty standard. Columbus was the hero who made a bad choice. Dillon is the mastermind who didn’t figure in all the angles. Fishburne just wants to kill something. Reno say like two words the whole film. Frankly the movie makers could have canned the 2nd string “Big names” and hired two or three writers to put together a more emotionally gripping film. But I guess they got what they paid for, I paid to see Laurence Fishburne, who was not interesting at all in this film.



In all this is probably a film you could skip and not have missed a thing. It is dry and not very exciting. It does have a twist or two that keep you wondering, but you are not sure you care enough about the characters to bother with being interested. Again this is a 6 out of 10, not an epic failure, but certainly not much of a winner either. In the end we learn that there are always bad guys and there is no such thing as the perfect heist, especially in a B movie where $42 million dollars are at stake.

Sex/Nudity - 3 out of 10 – we see a shirtless man once, and a man’s butt crack once. There is some discussion over the size of a man’s gentiles in a brief joke.

Violence/ Gore – 7 out of 10 - A man gets shot in the hip and we see his wound quite a few times, although it is usually in shadow or covered by a hand so we mostly see the pooling blood. 2 men are burned in an explosion, one man is stabbed, and we see his killer washing off the blood in a puddle. The violence is moderate, a little more than you would see in CSI or 24, and a little bit more blood.

Profanity -6 out of 10 - 1 audible “f: word and 4 more noticeable only with subtitles on. The other profanities are scattered throughout maybe 15 in total.