Armored review

I feel like there's a cut of "Armored" that really nails it. I mean hits the exact right notes. The film isn't bad, it's just too much of a mixed bag to fully like. Here's my case... director Nimrod Antal (who recently a nice new job directing "Predators" for Robert Rodriguez and FOX) has a great eye for styles and and even better ability of how to use them without making an exploitation flick. "Armored" is 90's caper film, with the darkened style of 70's John Carpenter action. I say 90's caper because now almost all caper films are formed off of the "Ocean's 11" format so they attempt to be as super cool. In the 90's you had things like this. Little action, lots of talk and often sequences that were good, but then were followed by one's that weren't balanced.

Screen Gems' child Columbus Short ("Quarantine" and "This Christmas") is the green lead as Ty Hackett, a former Iraq solider that came home after his parent death. He now takes care of his troubled teenage brother and works at the same security job as his father. Matt Dillon is Mike, Ty's godfather and co-worker. Mike is shady, but in his own way means well. He cares about Ty, but he has other plans... like the robbery. The rest of the team is equally filled out with 90's era badasses. Which for me was geekily cool, not unlike the three heads of the police squad in "Planet Terror". Laurence Fishburne is the crude and ill-mannered Baines, Jean 'The Professional' Reno is Quinn, Skeet Ulrich is almost unrecognizable as the grungy Dobbs and yeah for fun why not had Fred Ward as their chief. The crew dynamic is good and their conversations, though slanted towards a certain mindset, do serve the picture well.

Here's where I do start to wonder things though. As the robbery begins it seemed that certain pieces weren't edited right. Like it had been cut up too much and was making some bits tough to follow. Other times you get the drift, but some characters action might take them from zero to sixty in a second without much mid time for us to notice. And then the music. Of all the composer I'm shocked to learn that John Murphy, someone whose music I've always gone ga-ga over, made this over roasted hollywood generalized junk. And I say this because there's times where the music fucks the scene up. The MUSIC for crying out loud! But hey I'm not a hard person to please. Thus the mixed bag situation... there is some good.

Antal likes to leave characters roaming and show us that. Show us some downtime or leave a scene going a little longer. At times this makes for great suspense. In fact there is a really well done scene involved Skeet Ulrich trying to help Short's character by getting some engine parts for him. Also the little action in the film is pretty damn good. I enjoyed the lumbering armored truck chase and I have to say the ending crash was pretty nice looking. Also there are some surprisingly R-rated gun shots in the film as well. Which leads me to wonder did the films rating get bumped down when it got moved from a summer release to a winter release. Along with that is this brisk 88 minute film the actual whole product or simply something before we get an unrated director's cut? I actually hope so. I hope so because this is the kind of picture that I call a popcorn film and I wish I could say this one really is, but it's not fluid enough. And it's not quite fun enough.

I love this crew. Fishburne is an asshole, Quinn is the quiet, smart man and Dillon is the head badass. If there's nothing else going on, they just point the camera at him and you get the great concern looks from him. It's formulaic at times, but not gimmicky and it adds up. In fact I'm surprised I've liked it as much as I have, but really there needs to be a longer cut that would make the film work and some different music.

"Armored" ** 1/2 out of ****