Armor takes place in Mississippi, where disgraced, alcoholic former cop Jason Patric drives an armored car with his son Casey (Josh Wiggins), whom he also makes fun of in front of Casey's spouse when they're nice enough to invite him over for dinner. With a likeable hero like Patric, we have an equally likeable baddie in Stallone (his character name is "Rook"), and the two are on a collision course to wackiness when Rook plans to rob Patric's armored car. They end up in a standoff on a bridge, where Patric and his son try to hold off Stallone and his bad of ne'er-do-wells. That's pretty much it, standoff on a bridge, with maybe a flashback mixed in, and some of the fakest CGI water you've ever seen.
This is as lazy a Randall Scandal as you'll see. One location for the most part, Stallone showing up to be Stallone, Patric wishing he could be anywhere else--you can almost hear him yelling "I was in The Lost Boys damn it!" And that's the thing, if we liked Patric's character, this might matter some, but he's a jerk to his son, he's leading AA meetings while drinking, why am I rooting for him? And while Stallone's character is pretty cool, he has a lot of jerks in his team, like Dash Mihok's character. So this ends up being like an AITA ("Am I the Asshole") post on Reddit, where someone responds "ESH" ("Everyone Sucks Here"). And the thing is with a Randall Scandal, do they really care that we care? Not really, right? Did you stream it? I did. Then that's all that counts.
Speaking of counts, this is our sixth Stallone film on the site, but his first ever DTV movie. Not a bad deal to make it this far without one of these. And the moment I heard his voice, that unmistakable Stallone voice, it felt completely out of place here. What is that voice doing in this Randall Scandal? I don't think I'm alone in that either, because this movie has 29 critic reviews on IMDb, which used to be the going number for an earlier Willis Randall Scandal, but the later ones didn't quite hit those numbers. Like Fortress and Fortress: Sniper's Eye, which did 18 and 15 critic reviews respectively (though the first one also had an astounding 135 user reviews!), people had kind of had enough of these, but I think the novelty of Stallone in one was a big enough draw. He does have another one that was released this year, Alarum, so when that makes it to a free streamer we'll probably make it happen. He just turned 79 a few weeks ago, so the fact that he's pumping these out at all is fantastic. We'll take what we can get at this point.
When it comes to CGI, I'm not as much of a stickler on it, and especially when we're talking about DTV movies being made on a budget, I tend to let it slide--in fact, in some cases, like when it comes to depicting large animals, or really any animals at all, I prefer CGI. Leave the animals alone, I'll take a poorly CGI'd tiger over a real one in a movie any day. All that said, the CGI in this when the "water" is rushing into the armored car was a bit much. The CGI water in Black Dawn thought this looked ridiculous. I mean, I don't know how well you can tell from that picture, but it was like a low-budget effect from a cheap local TV show that's doing a silly bit between segments. Again, it just speaks to the overall lazy vibe these Randall Scandals give off. Do we pay a company a little but more to make it look better, or do we just go with this? And then Randall, from his poker game off-set, just waves at them to get them to leave him alone, before he gets bluffed into folding pocket kings and loses $2000, followed by him throwing a temper tantrum, which all leads to us seeing that cheap CGI water above.
This may be a bit of a spoiler, but if you've seen enough of these Randall Scandals, you won't be surprised by what I'm about to say. Rook, our baddie, turns kind of good, and then escapes with no repercussions for what he's done. Emmett, being the kind of person he is, I think he likes it when the bad guys win, which maybe can work if you make the baddie fun enough, but he seldom does that, so we get this awkward "we're letting the bad guy off" construct that doesn't exactly work. Look at A Day to Die, which we haven't reviewed yet but did do on a podcast episode. Leon as the baddie, kidnaps Kevin Dillon's pregnant wife, keeps her tied up, and menaces her, but in the end after they fight the crooked cops together, Leon joins Dillon and his wife in Caribbean or wherever they escape to. How could you spend any time with that guy after he did that to you? Or Cash Out, where 12 people are held hostage in a bank robbery and treated roughly by Travolta and his gang, but then because he gave them each $1 million after he escaped with all the cash it's okay? If you watch the Randall Scandal documentary you can see the psychology behind this, he treats people poorly all the time and feels like it's his right to get away with it, and movies like this are just a reflection of that.
Finally, Stallone's character's name, "Rook," reminded me of a famous post-NBA game press conference by former Memphis Grizzlies head coach David Fizdale. He was upset that his team was on the bad end of a lop-sided officiating performance, with more calls going in favor of the San Antonio Spurs, a veteran team that had won multiple championships in the past. At one point he said "they're not gon' rook us," meaning "they're not going to treat us like rookies," and every time someone in this movie called Stallone by his character name, "Rook," my first thought was "they not gon' rook us." He also famously finished the press conference with "take that for data!" Here's the link to it, it's a thing of beauty.
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi here in the States. If you're that curious to see what a Stallone Randall Scandal looks like, Tubi is the place to watch it. And if you haven't yet, you can check out the podcast Ty and I did on this, episode 214 in the archives.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29252358
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