‘Security’ is a movie that aims low and stays on target. Antonio Banderas, far removed from his days as the guitar case gunslinger in Desperado, plays a two dimensional archetype—a former soldier, struggling to find work to see his family who are forced to live two states away.
The soldier finds work as an overnight security guard in a mall, where he joins a crew of early 20-something stereotypes—the douche, the dork, the nerd, and the drunk chick who quickly defer to his general badassery when things go awry. And awry things do go. Shortly after our soldier puts on his new uniform, the mall is beset for the night by a gang of highly skilled, highly disposable criminal commandos on the hunt for a missing little girl, slated to testify against their employer.
This movie falls firmly within the “Die Hard in a….” genre of movies. Banderas is a solid, dependable action star and holds the movie together, and the cast of extra mall security aren’t half bad either. The child character, as written, is annoying and mostly serves to further the plot by always being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Ben Kingsley is delightfully out of place in this trash heap, and is fun to watch here as he growls threats into a walky-talky and watches with that classic British hapless beffudlement as his rent-a-goons are dispensed by a crew of Rated-R Paul Blarts…
I would have enjoyed the movie a little more if it stuck to more realistic violence instead of having specialized ninja goons with swords (Cung Le) or the token strong man—unnecessary additions if you had bothered to upgrade the villianry from the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
The direction by Alain Desrochers, whose credits includes a lot of TV series and music videos, stays within the traditional action movie confines and doesn’t go too over the top—except when our soldier boy shows that he can outsnipe a scoped rifleman from across a parking lot with nothing but a high powered pistol, while doing battle with the aforementioned ninja, but I digress.
See this movie if you are fan of dumb action movies with over the top villains and classic hardass leading men. It gets a zero for originality, and is just so-so on the direction, but for what it aims to be, it succeeds.
Security gets a two out of five: DECENT.
Vortainment 