Heist flick is Armoured... but not dangerous

Armoured: A talented cast let down by the script which has no nail-biting suspense

ARMOURED (12A)

Directed by Nimrod Antal
Starring Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne, Milo Ventimiglia & Columbus Short

By Lloyd Rundle

Beginning the year with more a whimper than a bang, Armoured is a heist flick about that old chestnut – the perfect crime that goes wrong because of the human element. It’s a guy flick about men with guns waiting for the day when they can use them – referencing Reservoir Dogs as it goes. Only, like Tarantino’s seminal heist-gone-wrong movie, when that day comes it doesn’t turn out as planned.

Like Tarantino before him, director Nimrod Antal has assembled an enviable cast of established character actors from Matt Dillon (Factotum, There’s Something About Mary), to Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix) and Jean Reno (Leon, La Femme Nikita), as well as younger less well-known but talented performers like Milo Ventimiglia (Heroes). But, that’s where the comparison ends as Armoured adds up to a lot less than it should.

The fault lies with the script, by first-timer James V. Simpson, which has precious little of that vital ingredient in any and all heist movies – nail-biting suspense. While it passes the time on a winter afternoon, Armoured is instantly forgettable and strangely charmless.

This is an unashamedly macho movie drenched in testosterone from beginning to end (the only female speaking role lasts little more than three minutes), with the lead played by relative newcomer Columbus Short (recently seen in Quarantine).

Short plays Ty Hackett, an Iraq War veteran returning to the US after the death of his parents to face a stack of unpaid medical bills, a mortgage and responsibility for his wayward 14-year-old brother, Jimmy. Thus, under the tutelage of his godfather, Chief Officer Cochrane (Dillon), Ty takes up a job as a security guard.

But only too late does he find out that Cochrane has other plans in store – to commit the perfect crime as leader of a gang of guards intent on robbing their firm of $42million by staging a heist en route. This, Cochrane says, will be a crime with no victims, no bad guys and no clues. The only thing it relies on is the co-operation of every guard involved. And so the writing is on the wall.

When the seemingly foolproof plan goes wrong (as you always knew it would) the men are pitted against each other to save themselves with Ty all that stands between them and their plans for a better life. And that’s the rub – you can see the pitfalls coming long before they appear on the horizon and there’s really nothing new under the sun.

Credit where credit is due – Matt Dillon does well as Cochrane, a man caught between being Ty’s loyal godfather or the guard’s criminal ‘Godather’, and going from charming to frustrated to downright insane with a steely glint in his eye. When the plan goes awry, Dillon doesn’t disappoint and is the beating heart of the film, keeping it steaming along from scene to scene. What lets him down is the sense that the script is ticking the requisite boxes as it goes and at the close Cochrane has nothing left to say – which pretty much says it all for the whole movie.

Fishburne as Baines, the hothead of the gang who brings the guards’ plan crashing down, is about as evil an evil-doer as Armoured gets but while Fishburne has played the psycho sidekick with some gusto in the past (The King Of New York comes to mind), here he comes across as merely childish, impulsive and, well, stupid. On the other hand, French actor Jean Reno, as the intense and ever-reliable guard, Quinn is so under-used in little more than a bit-part I couldn’t help but feel that that was more criminal than the heist itself.

The younger actors fare little better. In the lead, the little-known Short makes a good stab at being first concerned and then desperate as Ty, a good man forced to do bad, but in many ways he seems impossibly good for a man so down on his luck. As such, he’s a little dull and it’s difficult to rouse a cheer when he goes up against the odds. Fellow newcomers Skeet Ulrich and Amaury Nolasco as the younger guards in on the caper try desperately to put some meat on the bones of their characters. However, with only 85 minutes running time they are given too few opportunities to really shine.

Ventimiglia, as beat-cop Eckhart who stumbles onto the plan, plays it with a gruff determination and earnestness so akin to his role as Peter Petrelli in Heroes, the two characters are seemingly interchangeable. In the end his role is little more than a plot device to carry things along to their inevitable conclusion and feels a little forced.

With regard to the plot, most of the action takes place in an abandoned warehouse, much like Reservoir Dogs, which cinematographer Andrzej Sekula also worked. But Armoured has none of Dogs’ cartoonish dialogue and macabre sense of fun. Instead, what we get is Dillon mumbling portentously about doing anything for his “brothers” and bemoaning the plight of the working man in modern day America.

When the action comes it is too little too late and lacks the pyrotechnic punch of other action movie-staples. Therein lies the problem – this being a tale with no good guys and no bad guys, there is precious little heroism, humour or horror and it’s all strangely banal and charmless. Grounded in a pretty grim reality, the only thing that stretches the imagination in Armoured is that the plan for the robbery is so ridiculously simple as to be ludicrous. As the saying goes, if it were that easy…

As an audience we should care about these men who clearly have a sense of honour but little self-respect. The war in Iraq (and, by proxy, Afghanistan) and the fate of veterans coming home to a nation where there are few opportunities cast a long shadow. However, Armoured doesn’t have the feel of a movie made for our times – it’s just too generic – and instead of being innovative it simply a heist-by-numbers tale where the chips fall as we expect them to.

Armoured isn’t a bad film per se, and it’s clear the makers were well intentioned. Antal, who helmed the acclaimed Hungarian film noir Kontroll, shoots most of the movie in the dual confined spaces of the warehouse and the back of an armoured car, giving it a sense of the claustrophobia that inhabited his previous hit Vacancy. And Armoured looks good too – it’s has a seventies grainy style to the way it’s shot with all the rich colours drained from the screen leaving behind only the drab greys, greens and whites of urban decay.

Unfortunately, while all of that is very effective, most of the emotion seems to have been drained as well and Armoured feels tired and formulaic. Very little is resolved, even less changed and the references to the economy and the war are left hanging with little said about either.

The message is clear: If you are going to make a pop-bubblegum flick, make a pop-bubblegum flick – don’t add in weighty themes and then do nothing with them. Instead, what we are left with in Armoured is a mediocre film that can’t decide what it wants to be and is less substantial than the sum of its parts as a result. It’s good for an afternoon matinee with the boys but gone from the mind’s eye the moment you leave the theatre.