ARMORED

ARMORED, a 2009 B crime thriller, would make a nice bottom half of a double bill with ARMORED CAR ROBBERY (1950). I reviewed the earlier film back here on the blog back in July and while ARMORED is certainly the lesser of the two films, it's not without merit.

Two teams of armored car drivers and guards (six men in all), plot to steal several million dollars in cash that they are transporting and make it look like they were hijacked. It's a simple enough plan until, everyone say it with me now, things go wrong. And the thing that goes wrong is one of the crew.

Ty Hackett (Columbus Short), an Iraqi war veteran, is a guard working for Eagle Shield transport company. The bank is about to foreclose on his home and child protective services are talking about removing his younger brother Jimmy, from the household. He desperately needs his part of the cash so he agrees to go along with the plan concocted by his best friend Mike Cochrane (Matt Dillon) on the condition that no one gets hurt.

But when a homeless man is brutally gunned down during the heist (the man was a witness to the goings on), things suddenly take a very grim and dark turn. Ty rebels against the slaughter and his co-workers and, locking himself into one of the two armored cars, begins a desperate race against time to stop his friends while simultaneously saving the life of a wounded LAPD patrol officer and rescuing Jimmy from the clutches of the robbers.

There's a well staged chase between two armored cars and the violence is swift, tough and brutal. Veteran actors Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno and Fred Ward add much to the proceedings but this is clearly a one-on-one battle between Short and Dillon. Much of the action takes place in an enormous, abandoned industrial plant and cinematographer Andrzej Sekula shoots the location in imaginative and atmospheric ways.

Directed by Nimrod Antal from a screenplay by James V. Simpson, ARMORED makes no bones about what it is In fact, it wears it's B movie status as a proud badge of honor. It's a film that knows what it is and what it hopes to accomplish and does so admirably. Worth seeing.