Just Watch the Trailer

Armored

Directed By: Nimród Antal

Starring: Matt Dillon, Columbus Short, & Milo Ventimiglia

Trailers can often make or break a movie. You might not think that a two-minute stretch of seconds-long clips taken from a 90-minute movie would be able to harm the finished product, but you would be wrong. Case in point: Armored, a movie that might have been all right had I not seen its trailer in front of nearly every action movie I saw in theaters for the last half of 2009. The trailer, jam-packed with action scenes and big-bang explosives, establishes Armored as a heavy-hitting action thriller, the kind that would have you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end and leave you feeling breathless. That, my friends, is not what this movie is. That is what it tries to be, but it misses the mark so badly that it becomes almost tedious to endure. Every action scene in this movie is included, to some degree, in the trailer; every plot point and every twist are spelled out with painstaking detail in the trailer as well. When the credits rolled, I sat back and compared the movie with the trailer. I realized that both told the same story with the same amount of action, but that the trailer did it in just a few minutes, not just under an hour and a half. I hate to admit that Armored, in many ways, was just completely misguided from the get-go, because I had actually developed high expectations for it. In the end, though, it's a complete disappointment.

That is not to say that it isn't a technically well-made movie. To be sure, it is every bit as well-directed, well-acted, and well-produced as you might expect from director Nimrod Antal (who has made much better movies). The action scenes are staged brilliantly and would have been very exciting had I not already seen them. The cast, led by the good Columbus Short and the great Matt Dillon, is perfectly willing to give everything they have to the movie, really making the unbelievable situation rather believable. Sadly, all of this effort is wasted. I am reminded of a bowl of decorative fruit...it's pretty to look at, but the minute you take a bite, you suddenly want to vomit. It starts off on the right foot, though, introducing us to Ty Hackett (Chris Columbus), a genuinely good man who is struggling to raise his delinquent younger brother after his parents died earlier that year. He works at a security transportation service on a team with his godfather, Mike (Matt Dillon), and a few other friendly people. But, when they approach him to help in staging a heist of two of the vans (each holding $21 million dollars), Ty sees a very different side of them...but, ultimately, agrees to help out, because he really needs the money or he'll lose his home. No one can get hurt, though, he warns. The plan goes awry when a homeless man spots them stealing the money and one of the team members murders him to keep their secret. Ty, a war veteran sick of seeing death, locks himself in one of the vans and refuses to help. The biggest problem: he has half of the money in the van and the other team members need to get and hide it before they must report back to base.

Along the way, a police officer, Eckehart (a severely underused Milo Ventimiglia), is shot, and Ty takes it upon himself to sneak him inside the van to protect him from further injury. This is where my primary problem with the movie comes into play, aside from the fact that it is just awfully boring. I will be including a few spoilers and, though they are not very surprising, you might not want to read ahead if you don't like that sort of thing. It is not a surprise to say that Eckehart survives the movie because of Ty's quick-thinking, and that Ty ultimately foils the bad guys' plan. In the end, he is to receive a reward, which he will presumably use to save his home and keep custody of his brother. But, does he deserve a reward? Certainly, he saved Eckehart, and he did, eventually, turn against the bad guys...but he had still chosen to go along with their illegal plan for about half of the movie's runtime, against his better judgement. We can say that he was desperate and wasn't thinking clearly, but that doesn't hold up in our judicial system. What he had been planning to do was still wrong and, therefore, it's offensive that he would get a reward when, had he done the lawful and moral thing in the first place (i.e. reporting that there would be an attempted heist), it is safe to assume that none of the violence would have ever happened at all. In the end, he still holds partial responsibility for the crime.

I don't doubt that there is an audience for Armored, though I imagine that even its target demographic will be unimpressed with its limp attempts at becoming a full-fledged action movie. They will be turned off, as I was, by the endless scenes of men banging against the hinges on the van doors trying to get Ty out...clang, bang, clang, bang, clang...and so on and so forth. When, after all that incessant hammering, Ty simply steps out of the van (with most of those hinges still firmly intact), I had a strong desire to throw my remote control squarely through the television screen. The ending is uninspired to say the least, with all of the movie's momentum (because, strangely, it was able to build momentum) culminating in a lame fizzle, rather than a full-fledged explosion. Armored is tangled between its desires to be both a guilty action extravaganza and a character-driven drama, but it never achieves either. There is not enough unspoiled action for it to be called a sure-fire action movie, and the characters are too two-dimensional to really be more compelling than rats in a maze. At least, though, the rats will eventually make it to the end and get the cheese. The characters in Armored, like its dull narrative structure, walk around meaninglessly before starving to death without ever even coming close to their intended goal. Just watch the trailer; it's fun, entertaining, and far better than the movie itself. Trust me.