Armored (*)

Directed by: Nimród Antal

Starring: Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Laurence Fishburne, Amaury Nolasco, Fred Ward, Milo Ventimiglia, Skeet Ulrich, Columbus Short

Seen: March 26^th 2010

* Out of ****

In Armored, a few armoured transport company employees devise a “foolproof” plan to steal $42 million. The team consists of their commander (of sorts) Cochrane (Dillon), belligerent Baines (Fishburne), quiet Quinn (Reno), pained Palmer (Nolasco), docile Dobbs (Ulrich), and new guy Hackett (Short), a young Iraqi war veteran. When Cochrane tries to get Hackett in on their heist, he refuses at first; but when child services threaten to take his brother Jimmy from him, he joins providing no-one gets hurt. At heist time someone gets hurt, and then the hurt tally starts growing, so Tyler switches sides and barricades himself in one of the trucks – with $21 Million.

The team tries to find ways to get into the truck, with Hackett only barely managing to attract enough law enforcement attention for one officer, Jake Eckehart (Ventimiglia), to show up. Baines shoots Eckehart, and in a moment of diversion Hackett manages to get Eckehart into the truck with him. The situation worsens, and the team’s greed gets the better of them, as they become hungrier to get the money. Eckehart has Hackett on his side, but he is slowly bleeding to death.

I worked specifically in the cash management arena and thus I cannot begin to list all the issues I had with this movie, but I’ll give some: (1) armoured trucks do not travel in convoys, Armored pools all the risk into one place, (2) the depot in Armored is a warehouse where anyone who feels like it can drive in, (3) the truck itself has safes built into the truck, and has fortified floors, not a metal box with a locker key to store $21 million and not a floor with a thin metal plate between inside and outside, (4) the armoured trucks in Armored can be disabled by walking up to it, opening the engine cover from the outside, and pulling ONE fuse (which also deactivates the truck’s alarm), and (5) such large cash in transit transfers have armed transports, do not drive through derelict “target” areas, and have to check in much more often than only hourly. I’ve enjoyed many movies where a suspension of disbelief was required, but in this one even a friend who does not work for a bank was immediately sceptical, this is just too obviously badly thought through.

Which brings me to the acting: Dillon does his best emotionless henchman-leader type, one close-up even shows him drawing his hands down his oil-smeared face, to what effect I don’t know. Fishburne channels teenage-bully-inadequacy-angst, making you wonder how he got back to puberty. I can’t remember Reno actually speaking, instead wiling his time away looking 100% mentally challenged. Ulrich attempts three things simultaneously: being mean, quiet and remorseful, but with only limited success. Nolasco relives his Max Payne character, scowling all the way, very tortured by both the things he’s done and the things he’s still doing. Ventimiglia does not get the chance to do much more than complain about bleeding to death, but at least he’s convincing, and Columbus Short is the one relative unknown who kicks dust in everyone’s eyes, being the one team member to choose against the crime, even if not immediately.

Armored is a flash in the pan; over before it even starts, with one chase sequence where it seems that the good guy trying to get away picked the truck that has the weaker engine, as the bad guy chasing him has no trouble catching up to and continuously ramming him – with the supposed exact same vehicle… One villain even cricks his neck after killing a character, I kid you not. This movie is laughable, and I recommend staying home to rather watch some of the old action classics – re-hashing a classic like Die Hard 50 times always beats watching Armored once.