Security (2017)

PTSD-stricken army vet Eddie Deacon (Antonio Banderas) finally manages to land himself a job after a year or so of being out of work. On the negative side, he’s working for minimum wage as one of five security guards in a crappy shopping mall somewhere in Bulgaria the middle of nowhere USA; oh, and the shift boss (Liam McIntyre) is in idiot with a perversely absurd haircut who could be Eddie’s son – though fortunately isn’t.

His first night on the job turns out even worse than this sounds, though, for a kid (Katherine de la Rocha) stumbles into the mall looking for help. Jamie, as she is called, is the only witness to the murder of her father, connected to crimes that could land some rather nasty people in prison for a very long time. She’s just escaped an attack by mercenaries on the convoy of “USA Marshals” (that’s what’s stitched on their jackets at least) supposed to bring her to a safe place. These mercenaries are led by a guy calling himself Charlie (Ben Kingsley), and when you hire an Academy Award winner who has also been titled by the gosh-darned queen for that kind of role, you’ll sure as hell let him appear right in front of the mall a few minutes later, so that Eddie and his colleagues can play a bit of group Die Hard.

So yeah, Antonio Banderas has now reached a point in his career where he can be an elderly action hero too in a cheap direct to home video flick produced by – among others – Avi Lerner, and shot in Bulgaria, as is tradition. For Academy Award Winner Sir Ben Kingsley, this sort of thing is of course a step up. He was, after all, already in Uwe Boll movies, and unlike the stuff Boll craps out, director Alain Desrochers clearly tries his hardest to actually make a decent action flick.

Of the two mainstream actors involved, it’s Banderas whose coming out looking the best, because he’s neither phoning things in nor presenting himself as ironically above the film he is in, but really puts effort into the at heart silly little action hero role, Cuba Gooding Jr. style. Not surprisingly, Banderas’s willingness to go along does do Security a world of good, what with him being in nearly every scene. There’s obviously not a lot of depth to his character, but Banderas provides Eddie with presence and a feeling of personality, and that’s really all I want from the hero of an action movie. He looks also surprisingly fit in the action scenes.

Kingsley, on the other hand, is phoning his role in so badly my protestant work ethic (you can imagine it as a little guy in Victorian worker’s clothing sitting on my shoulder, throwing coal at people it disapproves of) became rather annoyed with him. Weirdly enough, it thinks if a movie’s good enough for an actor to get paid for it, it should be good enough for him to actually do his job. At least there’s good old Cung Le by Kingsley’s side to look threatening and glower.

The rest of the cast is pretty decent too. Of course, without Academy Awards and the approval of the Queen, you actually gotta put the work in and not just put your face in front of the camera, read your lines from a prompter, cash your check and go home. Sorry, I’m ranting. Anyway, the lack of a proper main villain doesn’t hurt the film as much as it could, mostly because Desrochers films around Kingsley rather well, and does manage to stage some decent, somewhat creative action scenes in which the not exactly fighting fit security people fight off the bad guys with various mall-made traps and improvised weapons. And later on, Banderas is even allowed to do a bit of gun fu.

Of course, all this won’t make you happy if you don’t have a degree of tolerance for some of the film’s problems – mostly caused by budgetary constraints, I believe. Obviously, the plot is not terribly plausible, but I have to admit, I’m not terribly phased by that in US low budget action cinema. I wouldn’t exactly complain about fewer clichés and more logic, but what can you do? Then there are the rather inauthentic ideas about America that come through again and again: there’s the whole “USA Marshals” thing (which somebody would have caught in a production with a higher budget and then simply redone), the fact that the mall is about as American as I am, strategically placed stars and stripes and americana notwithstanding, and quite a few other things of this sort. At least, these kinds of goofs have charm and are generally amusing, so they are not exactly terrible flaws.


As a matter of fact, there’s little wrong at all with Security when you look at it in the context of US low budget action cinema shot in Bulgaria, and if you’re going in keeping in mind what it is, you should be more than decently entertained. I’m certainly looking forward to more adventures of Banderas in Bulgaria.