Armored (2009)

I try and not bash movies/shows just for having a lame plot, except when they are being extremely hyped - and unjustly so, but I feel I have to add my 5 (?) Cent whenever a show/movie is offensive or immoral, and this one is the latter. For no understandable reason Hackett is portrayed as the hero and being rewarded in the end, when all he does is getting about 6-7 people killed (or 5-6 killed and one nearly killed and probably handicapped for life) while it could have been only one dead (bad enough, but better than several more). No money and no wrongly understood sudden change of moral is worth these losses. First, he agreed to go along with it - very naively believing that no one will get hurt - which is always a possible outcome in things like these, and when it goes south, he is the one who makes it go to hell even more. It would still have been disloyal and somewhat questionable had he gone through with the theft and afterwards ratted out his fellow workers to the police. But endangering many people and getting Dobbs and Palmer and whoever dies in his bomb trap and Cochrone killed and Eckehart severely injured - that's the worst move he could do. Sure, he gets Eckehart into hospital, but I doubt he will fully recover from this severe injury he would not have gotten at all if it wasn't for Hackett - he must have known that this is the likely outcome, what was he thinking? One man coming and they all put down their weapons? Very egoistical! If this is how Hollywood perceives heroes, we are all doomed. If you writers cannot come up with better actions/characters/plots, then better not write anything at all. That's poisonous. Other than that the movie isn't good anyway, and that you cannot side with Hackett plus the interesting characters being killed off early, makes it even worse. A waste of great actors.

Armored is the story of a broke security guard who is tempted into joining a staged hijack in order to loot money. No successful heist takes place without a hiccup or two, and in this movie as well, the surprise element is rather funny is what i would call. To imagine, there would be no movie plot,if the hijackers weren't seen stashing the money is a bit far fetched to say the least.What follows is a series of events,which are predictable to say the least.It is a bit sad to see established actors like Jean Reno (of Leon the professional) and Laurence Fishbourne resorting to such low budget flicks.Its almost as though,they are broke themselves :) There is some pretty bad acting in the movie,with half the characters portraying a confused and uninterested attitude. Matt Dillon is the only person who stands out. It is safe to say, that this movie would have been a disaster without him. On the whole,with a run time of a little under 90 mins,this is not a bad watch at all.

Some security workers form a plan to steal millions from the money they're transporting. One guy is not so into the plan, but with a bit of coaxing and persuasion, along with mitigating personal circumstances, he eventually agrees to it. Now I don't think most people would be so haughty and judgemental as to take that to signify a black mark against these individuals. They worked hard, had hard lives, and really wanted a break and to live their dream lives. Who says that people always need to bend the knee and respect government no matter how unfairly they are treated by them? Maybe they would argue that they are owed the money, or it is their money, and why should their claim be any less valid or correct than one that the controlling body says? I thought we had a more educated, sophisticated population than that. I'm not saying stealing this money is "okay", but just that there are some complex issues here, it's not all just black and white. The idea we're meant to just automatically consider taking it to be "wrong" is just ridiculous. I thought we had progressed from the "police = good, robber = bad" mentality, it's not always so simple. The government is not a god to be worshipped and they don't define morality. In particular if you make a deal with someone and agree to do something, then you really should carry through with it. Otherwise you are a liar and a two-faced snitch. Okay, if he turned in all his friends and ruined their lives... that would be bad enough. But after he had sworn allegiance to them? This guy who messed everything up, betrayed his comrades, and he's supposed to be the hero? He would have been better off just taking the damn money, everyone would have been happy, probably nobody would have ended up dead and there would be no movie. The corperations have screwed so many innocent people over over the years that they won't even notice the money is gone. Seemingly to guard against feeling for the bad guys they had the robbers who were going ahead with the plan do some indefensible things. But you could see that this was really contrived, it didn't match the rest of the movie or their characters. It's insulting to robbers everywhere and all anti-government protesters, anarchists everywhere to paint them in such a picture. Just because they don't believe in the current corrupt system does not make them bad people. The guys seemed like normal, cool, fun guys.The movie doesn't have anything else other than the above. There are no good action scenes, almost everything takes place in a bare warehouse. There were a couple of bizarre and totally unrealistic situations, such as the good guys gluing money to the window so that the guys outside wouldn't see what they were doing. On the whole a rubbish movie. Jean Reno looks embarrassed to be in there as well he should.

I remember this one being mentioned in dispatches when it came out, but that's about all I remember about it. Now, having seen it I find there's not a lot to add to that. It's a pretty forgettable run of the mill heist thriller with a surprisingly good cast considering how average it is. But more of my thoughts later, here's a brief summary first (summary haters please look after that big pile of cash while I write the next paragraph).Ty Hackett has recently graduated to be a security guard working for Eagle Security. They transport money in armoured trucks around the city. He is a decorated soldier having served in Iraq and has to look after his teenage brother, Jimmy, after both of their parents died. A group of his colleagues, led by Mike Cochrane, are planning to fake a heist and steal $42 million from two of their trucks. At first Ty is against the idea, but after a visit from Social Services about his brother, he changes his mind, on the condition that nobody is hurt. As they are hiding the money a homeless man is spotted spying on them and he is shot. This leaves Ty in a dilemma, should he just turn a blind eye, or should he stand by his principals? Well I guess that's enough to whet your appetite for now.I'll start with what I did like… well the music wasn't too bad and the cinematography was pretty good, and that's just about it. As I said, there is a pretty good cast which includes; Matt Dillon as Mike Cochrane, Jean Reno as Quinn, Laurence Fishburne as the trigger-happy Baines, Amaury Nolasco as Palmer, Fred Ward as the boss, Duncan Ashcroft, Milo Ventimiglia as Eckhart, Skeet Ulrich as the cop, Dodds and Columbus Short as Ty Hackett. None of which were really stretched in this pretty average caper.So in conclusion, it's a rather dull and slightly predictable heist movie with the twist being it's the guards committing the crime. There's very little here we haven't seen many times before. And so a very average film gets a very average score from me… Not recommended.My score: 4.9/10