Armored (Blu-Ray)
Nathan Swank
March 19th, 2010
Why? Why would all the actors do this movie? I just don’t get why this got made. It might be the worst heist movie ever. ARMORED clocks in at about an hour and twenty minutes. If you make a film that short, it better pack a punch. Sadly nothing here but one-dimensional dumb characters with some lame action.
Ty (Columbus Short) is a new guard for an armored truck company. He apparently got the job through a close friend of his fathers, Mike (Matt Dillon). Mike and the rest of the crew talk Ty into stealing a bunch of money they are transporting by pretending they get hijacked but keeping it for themselves. Well, plans get all muffed up and the crew reacts quite irrationally… actually insane is a better word. Ty finds himself on the only side of good defending himself inside an armored truck against his fellow team trying to save himself, the money and everyone else that they have to kill along the way.
The crew does some really dumb things. They don’t check to see if the coast is clear before stealing the money. They all run towards an explosion leaving a prisoner of theirs free. These are things a 9 year old would know to do just from the television they’ve been exposed to. And I’m a fan of mindless fun action movies but there was barely any action. The bad guys spent the entire time hammering away at the truck. They really needed something else to do.
The bad guys are strictly bad without grey areas. The film makers attempt to make the crew seem like good guys by forcing a scene with the guys laughing and having a drink together but they all turn on a dime and become murderers. None of the characters besides the lead have any motivations. The film has some good actors with Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne and Jean Reno. They all seem to coast through the movie with Fishburne specifically not taking the film seriously and Columbus Short taking the film too seriously.
The direction definitely had some odd choices. The camera kept panning around a character to reveal someone behind him who wasn’t there seconds ago. Each time I kept thinking how improbable it would be for the person or persons to be standing there all macho. They would have to tip toe then quickly act cool like they were standing there the entire time, even though the time that went by was physically impossible for them to show up. In the middle of the film, we have one of the few attempts at action, which consists of a chase scene between two armored trucks. The edits are so abrasive and random you can’t tell what’s happening, but what I gathered is they drove in a circle and crashed in their original spots.
The director, Nimrod Antal, also directed the very intense and surprising scary VACANCY. It too was a film that was a little short in length but at least it packed in thrills. He’s also directing the much-anticipated PREDATORS, which now I’m a little concerned about.
Armored has no cleverness, no action, no character development and no value.
BLU-RAY REVIEW
Video: 2.35:1 1080p High Definition. The picture looked all right but I would have been just as interested with a black wall.
Audio: 5.1 DTS-HD MA. Yes the lame car chase and exploding fire works sound great.
Producer and Cast Commentary: A producer and a couple of the supporting actors just sort of chitchat about how they really liked the movie and some of the tactics of character development and prop use. They all seem to take this film seriously.
Planning the Heist: Making Of (15:09): A basic making of featurette that covers the director, writer, DP, and cast talking about how great it is to work with each other and how good the movie is. Someone actually talks about how all the character have grey areas with no real bad guys, which is the exact opposite feeling I had.
Crash Course (11:30): Mostly about how they designed and choreographed the armored car chase scene in the middle of the film. Adjusting the vehicles so they were able to be more mobile and quick.
Armed and Underground: Production Design (6:47): Talks about how they created a believable warehouse on set without going on location. I’ll admit, the set design keeping the look of rusting and collapsing but keeping everything safe was actually pretty impressive.
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