Beaks here...

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...

And here's one more Ward classic.