IMDb says this based on the movie Le Convoyeur, which I haven't seen, so I don't know how similar the two are. Jason Statham takes a job with an armored car company. He doesn't seem like anything special until Post Malone (I'm serious, Post Malone is the leader of the thieves) tries to rob a truck he's in. At which point he kills the entire crew, mostly with one-shot kills between the eyes. Well, then.
Roughly an hour in, after Statham thwarts another attempted heist by simply showing his face, the movie goes into a flashback for about 30 minutes. Really, two flashbacks. The first is why Statham is doing this. Surprise! He wants revenge for a dead loved one. The second reveals who the guys he's looking for actually are, and how they got into robbing armored cars.
An aside, but I didn't realize armored car robberies were still so common. Nice to know there are still people out there stealing real physical money, instead of using a computer to steal a digital image of a sad monkey someone says is worth $300,000 or some shit.
The flashbacks establish two things: One, while Statham's character is not a nice man, he is an "honorable" criminal, to the extent some guy from the FBI (played by Andy Garcia, who is on screen for maybe 45 seconds total) will help him. Two, the crew of thieves have their own issues, mostly revolving around one member (Scott Eastwood) who won't stick to the plans.
That latter point naturally comes to a head in the big heist that kicks off once the flashbacks are over. The movie does actually get some tension out of the whole thing. Not just that we know at some point Statham is gonna go apeshit on these guys.
Throughout the movie, we see that the company encourages its employees not to risk their lives. This is, after all, other peoples' money. I'm dubious the company would actually tell them that, but we'll roll with it. The movie does nod to the notion all these people have some sort of past that's why they work for an armored car company, getting shot at for someone else's cash. Some of them are more well-adjusted than others, some of them are posing aggro dipshits (like Josh Hartnett's character, man this is a weird cast) but there's a strong streak of gallows humor that runs through the operation. So when things go bad, the audience wonders what some of the employees are going to do. Will they run, will they try to fight back? If one of their co-workers is held at gunpoint, will they surrender or do they not give a shit about that guy?
The ending is, not exactly satisfactory. Maybe because Statham has gone this far to get this particular guy, but the actual revenge doesn't seem like enough. It could be argued that having gone through all this, playing a role, searching, everything, he's just tired and ready for closure. But I really expected him to be more brutal about it.
2 comments:
I kinda liked this when I saw it late last year - you always know what you're going to get with Jason Statham and I think he's grown into the action hero role over the last decade.
I know what you mean about the ending, it did seem a little flat.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that about the ending. It felt like the movie expended its energy in the big shootout. At first, i really thought Eastwood's character was going to get away, like Statham died of his wounds and maybe his henchmen would get revenge for him, as an apology for dragging him in on the job that got his son killed in the first place.
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