Ty Hackett has returned from his tour of duty in Iraq and has his own set of problems to deal with once he’s back, his parents have passed away, his younger brother Jimmy is always getting into trouble, and he’s about to lose the family home. To make ends meet, Ty has been training with the Eagle Shield security company to be an armored car guard where he’s being mentored by an old family friend, Mike. Right as things are looking darkest for Ty, Mike reveals to him a plan that he and a few other guards have to heist 42 million dollars from one of their deliveries. Ty reluctantly goes along, and then things begin to go south…
That’s the premise to Armored a fun little B-movie heist film from director Nimrod Antal, who previously directed a fun little terror movie named Vacancy and will next be working on Predators. What I like about this film is that it’s not too over-the-top in what it does, and the guys performing the heist are your basic working stiffs, who really aren’t as equipped to deal with this situation as they’d like to think they are.
It’s a short movie, running about 88 minutes, and it doesn’t really waste it’s time on anything- it does just what it needs to do to set up it’s main character (Ty) and puts everything else in it’s proper place for this situation to play out.
The really good thing about the movie though is it’s cast- Columbus Short plays Ty and while I’m not that familiar with him (just found out that he’ll be in the movie version of DC Comics’ The Losers), I think he does solid work here and makes Ty a good character. But the real gold is in the other members of the cast- Matt Dillon as Mike, along with Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno, Amaury Nolasco and Skeet Ulrich make up the rest of the guards. Fred Ward plays their captain, and Milo Ventimiglia plays a young cop who stumbles onto the plan. Everyone does a nice job here and keeps this moving right along.
It’s a fun diversion film, nothing that will win any awards or anything like that, just some solid entertainment- probably for most, more fun to catch on home video or cable down the road.