In rural Alabama, James Brody (Jason Patric) is a recovering alcoholic who makes his living as an armored truck driver. He works with his son, Casey (Josh Wiggins). Every day, James and Casey transport millions from bank to bank and usually, they’re able to do it without incident. However, this day is different. James and Casey find themselves trapped on a bridge with a team of thieves on every side of them. James and Casey struggle to escape while working out their own personal issues.
Sylvester Stallone receives top billing in 2024’s Armor and, just by looking at the poster, you would probably be excused for assuming that Stallone was playing the hero of the film. Instead, Stallone only has a few minutes of screentime and he plays one of the criminals, a tough guy named Rook. Rook may be a professional thief but he has a conscience and he doesn’t believe in killing anyone who doesn’t need to be killed. That sets him apart from the rest of the thieves.
One may wonder what a star like Stallone is doing in a low-budget, direct-to-video film like this. The answer is that Armor was produced by Randall Emmett, a producer who specializes in getting big names to appear in small roles in B-movies. Not much money may have gone into the budget of Armor but one can be sure but the majority of it was used to pay Stallone’s salary. According to some comments left on Letterboxd by someone who claims to have worked on the film’s crew, Stallone shot his scenes in one day and was deliberately kept in the dark about the fact that the film was actually being directed by Emmett and not the credited Justin Routt. Now, whether or not any of that is true, I can’t definitely say for sure. However, it definitely has the ring of truth. Randall Emmett himself is best known for producing many of Bruce Willis’s final films. With Willis having retired and John Travolta perhaps busy, Sylvester Stallone ended up as Emmett’s star-in-name-only for Armor.
Give credit where credit is due. Stallone dominates the few scenes in which he appears. For all the criticism that Stallone has taken over the course of his career, this film reminds us that there’s no other actor who has quite the same screen presence as Sylvester Stallone. As for the rest of the cast, Jason Patric is convincing as the haunted James. Unfortunately, the film can never make up its mind whether or not it wants to be an action flick or a relationship drama. Patric does his best but he’s let down by a script that never seem to be quite sure what it wants to say.
I appreciated that this film took place in the South. The film opens with a news report about an armored truck crash in Dallas and, as soon as they mentioned the Thornton Freeway, I was like, “I was stuck there just a few days ago!” The majority of the film takes place on a bridge in Alabama. The scenery is lovely, even when the action is hackneyed.
Through the Shattered Lens 