The way I see it, there are two kinds of movies: those with Fred Ward, and garbage. Nimrod Antal's ARMORED is not garbage.
Judging from the just-released trailer, it actually looks like a pretty enjoyable heist flick populated with a bunch of tough-guy character actors - which is what I figured it'd be when I visited the set back in February of '08. The plot is nothing new: Columbus Short stars as a wet-behind-the-ears armored car guard who gets talked into pulling off an inside job by his colleagues (Matt Dillon, Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno and Amaury Nolasco); when the job goes bad and people get hurt, Short starts working against his co-conspirators. If it works, it'll be due to the cast and the action-staging expertise of Antal, who proved he's got the chops for this kind of thing with 2003's KONTROLL.
This is a mid-September release from Screen Gems, so don't expect much more than a solid genre picture. Then again, I'll be thrilled if half of this summer's $100 million event films turn out to be solid genre pictures, so maybe ARMORED will be something special after all. It's already got the Ward...
