Producers: Joel Cohen, Alissa Holley and Gwen Osborne   Director: Justin Routt   Screenplay: Adrian Speckert and Corey Todd Hughes   Cast: Jason Patric, Sylvester Stallone, Dash Mihok, Josh Wiggins, Blake Shields, Erin Ownbey, Jeff Chase, Joshua David Whites, Laney Stiebing, Joel Cohen, Beau Bommarito, Miller Garfinkle, Martin Bradford and Billy Viores    Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: D

Bargain-basement action movies are a dime a dozen on streaming sites nowadays—they’re today’s equivalent of the direct-to-video titles of the last generation—but they ordinarily require a recognizable name or two above the title to register with potential viewers.  “Armor” is about as bargain-ish as they come, but it boasts two bankable names, one of them Sylvester Stallone, who plays the villain of the piece, though, being Stallone, he’s a villain who follows a code of honor, unlike his comrades-in-arms.

We see him, using the nom de guerre Rook, preparing weapons alongside fellow thieves Smoke (Dash Mihok), Tex (Blake Shields), Viper (Jeff Chase), Echo (Joshua David Whites), Match (Martin Bradford) and Hawk (Billy Viores).  (One suspects that screenwriters Adrian Speckert and Corey Todd Hughes have watched “Reservoir Dogs” once too often.)

Their target is an armored car driven by a father-son team, James Brody (Jason Patric) and his boy Casey (Josh Wiggins).  James is an alcoholic ex-cop, secretly still drinking (an important, if unedifying plot point), whose relationship with his son is still tainted by an episode from their past—recounted in a flashback midway in the movie—in which his wife Trisha (Erin Ownbey) was killed in an auto crash for which he blames himself: driving with her and young Casey (Miller Garfinkle), though off-duty he’d insisted on ticketing a reckless driver (Beau Bommarito), and while their car was stopped beside the road, a truck crashed into it.  Though Casey, whose wife Sara (Laney Stiebing) is expecting, has forgiven him, James can’t forgive himself.

Their bond is tested when, having filled their truck with the contents of deposit boxes from a bank managed by an officious, insulting fellow (Joel Cohen, one of the producers), they set off along country roads, only to be pursued by Rook and his men.  They wind up trapped on an old bridge in the middle of nowhere between the gang’s two vehicles, and a standoff ensues between the gang and the men holed up inside the truck.  There’s lots of shooting and shouting over the course of an hour or so; a few gang members get picked off and Casey is wounded; a grenade blows the truck onto its side; a massive drill is produced to cut through the armor; James and Casey find that they’re carrying a lot more valuables than they thought, dangerous stuff; disputes boil over among the attackers, with hot-tempered Smoke clashing with Rook over whether to dump the truck over the side.

All of this sounds far more exciting in the telling than it emerges on screen, largely because Speckert and Hughes seem congenitally unable to produce anything but bland, cliché-ridden dialogue and director Justin Routt is incapable of imbuing the scenes with the energy and tension that could conceivably camouflage the essential preposterousness of the situation.  And while Patric and Wiggins try manfully to give some intensity to their underwritten characters and Mihok goes absolutely manic in an attempt to make Smoke a bulging-eyed threat, Stallone doesn’t appear to have bothered to have put any effort into his performance at all.  He simply saunters about with a perpetual scowl and an automatic rifle, delivering his lines in a monotone that suggests nothing more than impatience to pocket the money—his check, not the loot in the armored car. 

Worst of all, it appears that since he’s played by Stallone, Rook had to possess some grizzled nobility that would allow the character to walk off with a semi-heroic halo.  So the script ends with a supposed twist that keeps the guy from being a dyed-in-the-wool villain.  It totally deflates a balloon that’s been leaking air for sixty minutes or so. 

The rest of the cast go through the motions, and production designer Travis Zarwny and cinematographer Cale Finot do their best to make the static bridge location seem interesting.  But their work is rendered moot by Routt’s turgid pacing, Marc Fusco’s flaccid editing and Stallone’s deadening turn.  Yagmur Kaplan’s blowsy score tries to punch things up, to no avail.                

“Armor” is the sort of poverty-row action material that could have been saved only by a wild approach, imaginative style and a wicked sense of humor.  There’s no hint of any of them in this relentlessly dour, enervating heist movie.