There is a kind of filmic purgatory, a cinema of stalled ambition and aesthetic vacancy, where the only thing more oppressive than the endless hours of tedium is the lingering sense of money misspent. Armor is not just another addition to the b-movie landfill, it’s the sound of late-career legacy clanging hollowly on the asphalt of a bridge, the celluloid equivalent of watching Sylvester Stallone doze in real time, bracketed by echoes of his own mythos and, faintly, the dying whinny of a studio accountant’s last desperate crackle.
It wants to be an action-thriller, wants being the operative word. The film sets Stallone, Jason Patric (the once-promising ghost of “Speed 2” regret), and a handful of lesser-known satellite faces on (and around, though mostly on) an immobilized armored truck. James Brody (Patric), ex-cop, now security guard, doing his best Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Own Career” imitation, shares a stilted father-son rapport with Josh Wiggins’s wan Casey. Their thiefly adversary is Stallone’s Rook, a performance that recalls the mummified heroes of antiquity—present, menacing by contractual obligation, but already vanished in spirit.
The plot is an exercise in erasure. Hints of a set-up—millions in gold, generational trauma, a son at risk—dissolve into the kind of dramatic inertia you expect from a two-hour DMV instructional video. The camera seems glued in place, as if even the cinematographer grew lethargic and set the equipment to autopilot; each shot is a little mausoleum, every line of dialogue a tombstone for unambitious craftsmanship.
The real action, if you can call it that, is the restless shifting of your own body in the seat, waiting for the leaden minutes to pass. The only real tension is between the special effects budget and the laws of physics: the CGI is so terrible that you begin to suspect the film is an elaborate prank, a placeholder for a real movie accidentally released. Editing appears to have been handled by a committee of sleep-deprived interns racing against the battery life of a single shared laptop.
And then, of course, there's Stallone, less a role than a cameo stretched to the point of physical comedy. If his presence was meant to lend gravitas, what we get is a bored colossus: a once-fearsome action god content to mutter and smirk, clearly filmed in the three hours between Pilates and lunch. Even the flashbacks, a death, a bottle of vodka disguised with the subtlety of a pink elephant, serve not to build character but to pad the running time. The villainous gang, allegedly “skilled,” are less a threat than a loose collection of character actor mannerisms, none of which can disguise the lack of stakes, urgency, or basic narrative momentum.
If anything endures, it’s a kind of bleak fascination with the film’s emptiness. This is the sort of movie where you can almost feel the boom microphone drooping in despair just out of frame. Jason Patric, haunted by the long shadow of better films, manages a moment or two of authentic resignation, but otherwise gives the sense of an actor remembering (mid-scene) which mortgage payment this gig was meant to cover. Dash Mihok and Josh Whites, stranded on the bridge of ennui, do what they can.
“Armor” is not, I suppose, the absolute nadir of cinema, there’s always a lower rung, but its flat, mindless torpor belongs to that special category of celluloid oblivion reserved for projects assembled by people who, quite evidently, have no faith in their audience’s memory or discernment. It is the ghost-directed, CG-stained, actor-wasting spawn of a system that cares only about which faded name can still briefly light up a digital marquee.
No doubt, we haven’t seen the last of Routt and Stallone, a prospect that settles over me like the news of another wet, colorless week ahead. And with Justin Routt already lining up Alarum, once again tempting fate and Stallone’s contractually obligated indifference, it seems this cycle of cinematic somnambulism is far from over. For now, Armor stands as a curio in the museum of tired, empty action flicks: a film in which, with almost comic precision, absolutely nothing stirs. If only forgetting it were as easy as watching it. But here we go again, Alarum awaits, and I can hardly pretend I’m not bracing myself.
