Armored

Seen at: Cinemark Greeley Mall 16, at 2:45 p.m. on Dec. 23.

You can usually tell a movie is going to be bad when its release gets delayed. Armored was supposed to come out in October, but got bumped to the early December pre-Christmas slot, which is where movies go to die. Thus it got swiftly bumped out of the theaters by the Christmas onslaught, and after two weeks of it being out, I was forced to drive over to Greeley to see it. As it happened, the only day I could make it was right after a big snowstorm that shellacked the highways with ice. I've never made such an effort to see a movie. As I sat in the theater waiting for it to start, I couldn't help dreading the impeding experience.

Turns out I was completely wrong in my expectations, as I often am. Although I thought I was gong to see a dreadful, formulaic heist-gone-wrong movie (about the inside-job robbery of an armored car), the story felt fresh and enlivened by interesting characters. I knew from the opening scenes, that set up the two main characters, that I was going to like, Matt Dillon, in particular, was superb as the bad guy, whose entire character is established in the opening shot of him looking in the mirror, and not liking what he is seeing.

The story---which was reminiscent of some of the work of Sidney Lumet---just flew by. There was just the right amount of action and violence to make it work, without going overboard. The casting was also particularly good.

There was, however, one thing that really bothered me about this movie. It was released by Sony Screen Gems. As in the case of Untraceable (2008) and this fall's Stepfather, both of them released through Sony Screen Gems as well, one of the main themes of the story is how evil people in our society can exploit holes in the electronic control grid. Armored has the lightest version of this particular theme, but it is still nevertheless present (basically it is that universal GPS tracking would solve everything).

The common but subtle message of these Sony movies seems to be: "Big Brother is good, but it needs to get even bigger in order to make us safe." With the release of Armored, the pattern is clear. Sony Screen Gems seems to like making these kinds of scripts, for whatever reason. I'm definitely keeping my eyes out for this in the future.

Verdict: a superb underated thriller-drama marred by an injection of totalitarian propaganda.