Armored

In this blue-collar actioner, Columbus Short plays an impoverished soldier-turned-security guard worried about losing both his house and custody of his teenage brother (Andre Kinney). So when a colleague (Matt Dillon) suggests that they rip off the $40 million they’re supposed to be protecting with fellow rent-a-cops (Jean Reno, Skeet Ulrich, Laurence Fishburne, and Amaury Nolasco), he reluctantly goes along. Does everything go according to plan? No, and Short spends most of the movie scuttling in and out of an armored truck while trying to save the life of Milo Ventimiglia’s cop character. Did writer James V. Simpson have any grand ambitions for the film? Possibly: Ulrich’s character shares a name with Humphrey Bogart’s luckless gold prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Alas, Armored is one predictable and forgettable movie that should consider itself very lucky not to have gone straight to DVD. On the positive side, director Nimród Antal — who made the grimly wonderful 2003 Hungarian movie Kontroll and is overseeing the forthcoming Predator reboot — pushes the bulk of the film along with a muscular efficiency. And this Die Hard-in-a-security-truck movie is at least less ludicrous than Ulrich’s previous Speed-in-an-ice-cream-truck fiasco, Chill Factor.

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