Review: ARMORED

ARMORED is easily one of the dullest action films I’ve ever seen in my entire life. The story is bland, the characters are uninteresting and worst of all, it’s just plain lazy. ARMORED is about a young war veteran Ty (Columbus Short), and his younger brother Jimmy (Andre Kinney), who’s parents have passed away in the last year. Ty has taken it upon himself to get a job and take care of his younger broth. Ty’s job is that of an armored truck guard. He helps move large amounts of money from one place to another. He got the job because his father worked at the company, Eagle Shield Security, as does his godfather Mike (Matt Dillon). The biggest problem in Ty’s life is that he’s just not making enough money and the bank is threatening to take his house.

When ARMORED starts, Ty is just a rookie, a probationary member of the team, but soon he’s a full fledged guard. This is when Mike presents Ty with an offer. Knowing that Ty is down on his luck and that he could lose his house and Jimmy he presents the idea of robbing the armored trucks by setting up a fake ambush. The take would be fourty two million dollars split a few different ways worthless supporting cast of armored truck security agents.  Ty of course, being the moral force of good in the story can’t really justify the theft of that much money until he’s present with another problem that could separate him from his brother until Jimmy tuns 18. Ty’s in, but only if no one gets hurt… of course everything goes terribly wrong and soon it’s Ty against a group of actors that I would have loved to have seen in any movie but this.

I have a lot of complaints with ARMORED and the biggest one is the cast. You have actors like Laurence Fishburne playing Baines, a veteran in the world of armored trucks. You also have Jean Reno, a favorite actor of mine, playing Quinn, a character with so few lines that he’s barely a character at all. The rest of the cast is filled out with the likes of Skeet Ulrich who doesn’t say a word for the first 45 minutes he’s on screen. Milo Ventimiglia shows up as Eckhart, a sherif who stumbles upon the situation and who gives a pretty decent performance considering the role he’s given. But other wise you have a completely wasted cast. Any of these characters could have been punched up, given some depth and made the story interesting. Instead they sit around for about an hour trying to get Ty out of a truck. It’s one of the most boring films I’ve ever seen for that reason.

My other huge complaint with the film is just the wasted potential. You have a movie about armored trucks, moving vaults armed to the teeth, safer than most banks, and what does the story have them do? Nothing. A guy sits in one for a long time trying to figure out how to not get killed while the rest of the guys try to get in. When you have a movie about cool looking powerful trucks, and you give them so many glory shots at the start of the film, it’d be best to keep them moving for the majority of the movie. Instead the movie comes to a crawl when the thieves make off with the money and hold up in an old steel mill that suffers from “Hollywood Design-itis” which is when it’s very obvious a set was made for very particular shots and lacks any organic feel whatsoever. Had this movie really been about a moving heist, a constant chase for money involving these two amazing vehicles, it could have had some punch to it, instead it just sits and gets very boring very soon.

I honestly can’t recommend this movie in any way. It’s a stagnant slab of mediocrity filled with big names that are given nothing to do. Matt Dillon is an academy award winner, Jean Reno is one of the better French actors of all time, and Laurence Fishburne is Morpheus, the ultimate symbol of cool. But here they’re all just faces standing around. The dialog is boring and I swear I nodded off for a second and didn’t miss a thing (my room mate informed me of such). Any movie that puts me to sleep (which is really hard to do) doesn’t deserve my time. ARMORED gets 1 out of 5… and that’s like getting an E for effort.