Snap Judgements: Armored; Transylmania

Armored

In most heist movies, the least interesting aspect is the heist itself. Of course things go wrong. They always do. Otherwise what would be the point of watching a seamless operation? No, the best part of any heist movie is the before & after. The planning, and the fallout. Nimrod Antal's Armored is a muscular brute of a heist film. It leaves out all that unnecessary planning stuff, and goes straight for the take. Columbus Short(Stomp the Yard) stars as a newbie armored security guard. His team consists of Matt Dillon, the once great Larry Fishburne, Jean Reno, and Skeet Ulrich. That's a helluva line-up. They hatch a scheme to make away with $42M in money that they should be transporting, with the promise that nobody will get hurt in the process. Of course that all goes awry when innocent victims, including one cop(Heroes' Milo Ventimiglia) start getting full of lead. Armored is a no frills guy flick. It comes with two of everything. Double-crosses, double barreled shotguns, and dueling armored trucks racing down a dirt road. What it needed was an extra plot, which is almost insultingly thin and airy. It's almost like it was shot full of holes itself. Then, this isn't a film trying to be intelligent, and the actors seem more than happy to go along with that. Worth a rental, or if you're in the mood to shut your brain off for 80 minutes.

6/10

Transylmania

In case you couldn't tell, the girl in the picture is sporting a massive hump. Yeah, like Igor. That's the level of humor at play here, in what is essentially National Lampoon's Dorm Daze 3. If you haven't had the "pleasure" of experiencing Dorm Daze's 1 & 2 on late night Cinemax, don't worry your head over it. Dorm Daze is essentially a bunch of clueless students in college who find their way into one misadventure after another. At first it was an errant exchange student...then it was a jewel heist....and now vampires. The gang has signed up for a semester abroad in Romania, at a castle which I'm betting belongs to Nic Cage. Of course it has a real life vampire living in it, with a harem and everything. Hypothetical hilarity ensues. Transylmania makes me long for the relatively inoffensive suckage that was Dorm Daze. This is basically one long excuse to make Eurotrash jokes, and if I wanted that I'd be much happier revisting the far funnier Eurotrip.

3/10