Released Tuesday on DVD: "Armored"

Grade: C-plus

It took a while for someone to finally make a variation on Reservoir Dogs, and as that, Armored actually finds a way to work some nail-biting tension into the proceedings. It isn't bulletproof by a long shot, but director Nimrod Antal's grungy gang-of-thieves film is tough and, for this genre, surprisingly ethical.

Matt Dillon is Cochrone, the leader of six security guards entrusted with transporting huge amounts of cash from banks. As a new member, Hackett (Columbus Short), joins them. Cochrane tells tales of hijacking jobs gone bad. The big mistake, he seems to think, is that the guys doing the hijacking didn't think big enough.

So Cochrane comes up with a plan to take the payloads from the trucks during one especially high-dollar-sign transport run. He needs all six guys on board, though - and when Hackett objects to the ruthless measures taken when he was promised there'd be no victims, he tries to opt out.

But his fellow guards stop him, and Hackett finds himself locked inside one of the armored trucks with only a short amount of time to go before Cochrane, Baines (a weighty Laurence Fishburne), and the others find a way to get inside the impenetrable vehicle and stop Hackett from telling the cops.

Antal (whose previous films Vacancy and Kontroll earned him a cult following) has a nice sense of the claustrophobic, and he and cinematographer Andrzej Sekula (who also shot American Psycho) give industrialized, broken-down urban areas a shadowy, gun-metal-blue tinge (the places these scruffy guards, each of them bearded or five-o'clock-shadowed, hang is out is nowhere you'd want to be). As Hackett is closed in on - first in an abandoned factory, then an armored truck and finally by his former comrades - things get more and more tense. The arrival of a wounded cop (Heroes costar Milo Ventimiglia) only ups the stakes.

Unfortunately, most of the acting is of the grunt-shrug-and-bark variety (Jean Reno, Skeet Ulrich and Amaury Nolasco round out this wild bunch), and there's even a gruff captain (Fred Ward) who gives Hill Street Blues-like admonitions to be careful out there. But the actors, drowning in testosterone and adrenaline, have themselves a real time, and Hackett is a kind of guy not found often in gritty action thrillers. Trying to keep the house he and his younger brother live in, Hackett rejects the lure of ill-gotten gains and quietly, unassumingly stays true to his own moral compass. And Armored has the guts to reward the character for it, payback essentially for his rejecting the wages of fear.

Released yesterday on DVD: "Old Dogs"

Grade: F

I guess it’s appropriate as Easter approaches that we have Old Dogs, the season's blue-ribbon ham. A family comedy about two aging buddies forced to play daddy, it looks exactly like what you’d get if Robin Williams and John Travolta went out, got hammered, scrawled scenes on a bar napkin in random order, gave the napkin to Wild Hogs director Walt Becker, and filmed it. Trust me, you could do this all by yourself and save yourself the DVD rental fee.

The stars play Dan (Williams) and Charlie (Travolta), childhood pals now running a successful sports marketing company. (Travolta’s hairpiece plays itself.) They’re cut from the odd-couple mold: Dan’s a repressed fussbudget, Charlie’s the good-time, uh, Charlie. The nonsensical plot begins when Dan’s ex-wife (Kelly Preston, a.k.a. Mrs. Travolta) from a one-day Vegas marriage turns up with 7-year-old twins he didn’t know were his (Conner Rayburn and Ella Bleu Travolta), announces she’s going to jail — for two weeks! for eco-terrorism! — and leaves the kids with the boys.

Old Dogs then veers from one flatly filmed, crassly comic sequence to the next with so little regard for connective logic that it’s practically avant-garde. The kids want to go camping? Cue the stars in Boy Scout uniforms harassed by Matt Dillon and Justin Long as psycho troop leaders. Dan’s not able to relax around his children? Charlie shows him how it’s done via a remote-controlled puppet suit. Who wrote this thing — Wile E. Coyote?

If Old Dogs isn’t the absolute worst movie either star has appeared in, it’s close enough to count. No crotch goes unpummeled here, no supporting actor misused. The lovely Lori Loughlin is bizarrely cast as a translator who asks Charlie on a date to her bereavement group, which is led by Ann-Margret nattering on about a rhubarb pie. Rita Wilson turns up as a cross-eyed hand model. The stars end up stuck in a gorilla enclosure with a shrieking Seth Green and a guy in an ape suit. It’s the drugs, I tell you.

At least Travolta got to spend a working vacation with his wife and daughter; that still doesn’t mean we have to pay for it. Old Dogs has the feel of a project that was made in a spirit of collegial fun and finished in a rush of desperation, with digital effects Ella Bleu must have done on her Polly Pocket computer.

You get the sense of how long the movie has been sitting on the shelf when Bernie Mac, who died 15 months for before its release, shows up as a magician. The studio, Disney, may have delayed the release of Old Dogs out of respect for the deceased comedian, or out of respect for Travolta after the death of his son last year. That’s very sensitive. If they had any respect for viewers, they might never have released it at all.