As connoisseurs of DTV action cinema well know, even the most promising film is likely to wind up being about 15 minutes of good stuff crammed into roughly 80 minutes of two people standing around in a nondescript office or Bulgarian alley talking, with the top-billed, big-named star making but a brief appearance. Put differently, it’s rare that you get an outright banger along the lines of legendary stuff like Undisputed 3 or Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. But on the other hand, the vast majority of this stuff is also mostly serviceable on the whole, even if it’s not blowing anyone’s skirt up. And look, that’s just fine, especially for us fans, but mileages will undeniably vary amongst the general audience as to whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze.
Justin Routt’s Armor lands, for better or worse, in the “mostly serviceable” category. Jason Patric stars as James Brody, an alcoholic who can’t leave the bottle even as he plays host to AA meetings. Formerly a cop, Brody now drives an armored car along with — pretty implausibly, to this writer’s mind — his son Casey (Josh Wiggins). They have a strained relationship due to A.) the aforementioned drinking problem and B.) the eventually to be explicated backstory of James’ wife and Casey’s mother, the source of the trauma that, of course, led to Problem A. Unfortunately for them, but gladly for us, today is the day that they get robbed by a band of bad guys led by Rook (Sylvester Stallone) and his very hot-tempered coworker (Dash Mihok).
After this incitement, the vast majority of Armor takes place inside the truck, after it winds up overturned on a remote bridge, with father and son trapped inside trying to outwit the robbers who are doing their best to bust in. Part of the fun of DTV stuff like this comes in seeing where the low budgets spend their money, and in that sense, the sort of locked-room premise here has some gas in it. Unfortunately, there are also a bunch of flashbacks to our characters’ pasts and guys shouting threats at each other while not much actual story happens, and that is a decidedly less fun element at play here. Stallone mostly spends his time on screen just standing there glowering, and his character is so clearly and cleanly the honorable thief that there’s both nowhere for him to go and nothing really interesting for him to do. Patric is given all the requisite histrionics as the aggrieved patriarch, but the backstory is all cliché. And formally, when Routt isn’t utilizing handheld in the back of the truck, viewers are fully situated within Louisiana Tax Break Cinema territory here, with the film delivering a lot of slow drone shots of the single outdoor location where all this is going down. There’s a necessarily limited amount of screen violence, and those few minutes end up being satisfying enough on their own, but in the context of the larger, more sluggish tale, such limited pleasures simply aren’t enough. And so the formula holds fast: you could certainly do a lot worse than Armor, but you could also do a good deal better, even given the lowered ceiling of its DTV origins.
DIRECTOR: Justin Routt; CAST: Jason Patric, Sylvester Stallone, Dash Mihok, Josh Wiggins; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: November 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min.
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