Armored (Devil's Advocates Review)

A while back I reviewed Stomp The Yard for the Naperville Sun and I was pretty harsh to the film.  I did, however, decide that I enjoyed Columbus Short as an actor and vowed to watch his career and act as a sheperd, guiding him in his career.  Now, Short isn’t taking my calls, so the best way I can think to reach him is through this site.  

Short comes across with an intensity that is nearly unparalleled in his acting age range.  He makes the audience feel everything he feels, with his amazing emotional capacity.  In each and every scene you understood apprehension, anguish, and despair, because Columbus emotes in a way that forces the audience into an empathetic trance.  I’d even go so far as to say he was the most convincing of the cast, even though he lacks the pedigree the others have.  

Reno's looking at the money as if he were expecting French currency.

 

Short’s Ty gets caught up in a plot to steal millions of dollars, not because of greed, but because he is on the brink of losing his home and his brother.  The dispiritedness is not only well portrayed, but also an understandable justification for his actions.  While the crime itself can’t really be justified, Ty’s choice to become involved in the scheme makes sense and helps to keep the viewer connected to him, regardless of his actions.  

Aside from Short’s performance, another aspect of the film I enjoyed was the lack of ego within the story.  So many screenplays reek of ego as each scene tries to top the other, and then the other, and so on.  Armored is straight forward in it’s approach, in the sense that the action isn’t continually climbing in an attempt to reach the peak of actiondom.  Rather, the action is condusive to the story, and compliments it rather than rendering it inert.  

  

My praise of Short and the action/story interaction is where the praise ends.  As an overall film, I was disappointed.  The story has plot holes that could only be filled with the stolen $42 million seen in the film.  The movie trucks along in an unnatural manner, utlizing what I call “forced prophecy fulfillment”, which is when a character references a potential future event, only to have that exact thing happen moments later.  Writers try to play it off as foreshadowing, but foreshadowing shouldn’t be that overt.    Besides Short, and possibly Skeet Ulrich, the performances were majority blah, which is a shame since Jean Reno, Matt Dillon, and Lawrence Fishburne typically turn in good performances.  I guess they were unimpressed with the writing as well.