Armor
It’s fair to say there’s some chinks in this “Armor.”
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Sylvester Stallone took a break from introducing Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago (gross!) to do one day and make $3.5 million filming “Armor” (available on VOD and in select theaters including Indianapolis-area locations Emagine Noblesville in Noblesville, Ind. and VIP Legacy 9 in Greenfield, Ind. beginning Friday, Nov. 22).
Jason Patric (fresh off of “Terrifier 3”) and Josh Wiggins star as father and son armored car-driving duo James and Casey Brody. James sought solace in the bottle after the death of his wife Trisha (Erin Ownbey). Casey’s carving his own path in life and is expecting his first child with his wife Sara (Laney Stiebing).
On a run-of-the-mill run James and Casey get stuck and stuck up on a decrepit, old bridge during a Louisiana summer’s day that’s hotter than Hades. (Pearlington and Waveland, Miss. fill in.) The perpetrators are the awesomely/ridiculously-named Rook (Stallone), Smoke (Dash Mihok), Viper (Jeff Chase, he’s the BIG dude Ben Foster memorably seduced and destroyed in Simon West’s “The Mechanic” remake) and Echo (Josh Whites).
Justin Routt is the credited director on “Armor,” but rumor suggests producer Randall Emmett was actually the one calling the shots. Gossip also submits that the shoot was cut from 15 days down to 9. Whomever helmed the film, it’s a mixed bag.
The centerpiece action sequence is a pretty cool shoot-out, which works despite shoddy CGI muzzle flashes and bullet hits. The geography is clear and the scene is plenty adrenalized thanks to the cinematography of Cale Finot and editing of Marc Fusco.
There’s an “underwater” sequence that’s one of the most unintentionally funny and inept things I’ve seen in quite some time. The filmmakers must not have had the time nor the money to actually film underwater so they employed a blue filter and fake CG bubbles. This looks like a Facebook add-on from five or so years ago and screams of techniques a middle or high schooler might employ on a school project. SpongeBob SquarePants would be laughing at this shit from his pineapple under the sea.
The acting is generally pretty good. Patric and Wiggins sell their father-son relationship and are easy to root for. Stallone and Whites are villains with heart. Mihok, an actor I’ve long admired dating all the way back to the mid-to-late 1990s with movies such as “Romeo + Juliet” and “The Thin Red Line,” is the wild card here and entertainingly devours scenery.
Stallone comparing Trump to George Washington is akin to me contrasting this with Michael Mann’s “Heat.” It’s fair to say there’s some chinks in this “Armor.”