Body Armour is a perfectly acceptable albeit kind of forgettable action drama that boasts a better than average hook. Til Schweiger stars as a bodyguard who is unable to save the governor when she is assassinated by master criminal Chazz Palminteri. He spends the next three years sulking before finally agreeing to his next assignment. It seems his top-secret client is about to blow the whistle on a vast criminal underworld, and Schweiger’s mission is to keep him alive for the next three days so he can testify in court. Schweiger is inflamed when he eventually learns his mystery client is none other than Palminteri himself.
The neat hook and the playfulness of Palminteri’s performance sets this apart from other DTV actioners. The movie is at its best when Palminteri is needling Schweiger and goading him into a confrontation. While It’s reasonably fun and clever whenever the two leads are at each other’s throats, it’s noticeably less successful once they call a détente and decide to work together. I could’ve also done without the generic scenes of Schweiger’s cliched burnout character moping around and feeling sorry for himself in the early going. The stuff involving Palminteri trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Cristina Brondo) kind of feels like padding too.
Despite those little hiccups, director Gerry (The Art of War 3) Lively does a decent job for the most part. The shootouts and fight scenes are competently handled, if a little on the unspectacular side. On the plus side, the script by Ken Lamplugh and John Weidner (who also wrote C.I.A. Code Name: Alexa together) is a tad smarter than it needs to be, which helps it overcome the occasional lull. Whenever Schweiger and Palminteri are bickering, the picture has a certain spark and charm to it. The rest has enough moments to make it an agreeable action flick for the indiscriminate DTV fan.
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