The Fight For $15 Never Had A Better Champion- The Trails and Tribulations Of A $9.50/Hr. Rent-A-Cop-Antonio Banderas And Ben Kingsley’s “Security” (2017)- A Film Review And More

DVD Review

By Will Bradley

Security, starring Antonio Banderas as the good guy savior plebian prince and Ben Kingsley as the bad-ass take no prisoners bad guy working for the highest bidder, 2017

I will not discuss why actors, good actors, actors like Antonio Banderas and Ben Kingsley who have been given high awards in the film industry like Golden Globes and Oscars get roped into films like the film under review Security. Not that the action-packed thriller was not a nice bit of fluff entertainment for a snowy evening, but anybody could have filled either good guy- bad guy role and nobody would have been the wiser. Whereas films like Zorro (Banderas) and Gandhi (Kingsley) require talent and presence. It seems a shame that a pretty thin plot-line and the necessity for severe suspension of disbelief lured them into this one, hopefully they made plenty of kale to wash away their sins.

We might as well get to the particulars. Disheveled, distraught and drifting ex-Army Captain Banderas (Iraq, a few tours) cannot as a lot of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and before them the Vietnam War vets get it together back in the “real world,” back in 9 to 5 world.* He is separated from family, living mainly out of broken down truck and a long-term unemployed. Once the ex-Captain makes the turn back to trying to get on with his life he needs work, will take anything to get back in the swing of things. Hence the $9.50 an hour rent-a-cop job in a suburban shopping mall location not disclosed but given it proximity to two small cities with serious opioid epidemics somewhere in the rural heartland. Complemented, when the dust clears, by a clear signal that the Fight for $15 is only the beginning of wisdom.     

The first night on the job, before even his first coffee break, almost the first minute he is hell-bound for glory. Here is where my wondering about Banderas and Kingsley wasting their talents on a thin plotline get things all balled up. Down the road from the mall a high security federal marshal’s convoy is waylaid by a bad-ass bad guy platoon, no, company of thugs and hit men led by independent contractor Kingsley. The reason for the hijacking. That convoy was conveying a twelve-year old witness who had seen her father who had worked as an accountant for the mob killed by one of their hit squads to a courthouse to testify to what she saw. See Pops had been snitching to the feds and the mob got nervous and hired muscle to stop the change of events in their tracks.         

As usual the so-called hit squad was really the gang that could not shoot straight since the little urchin got away. Got away as you can guess to the mall (some kind of modern-day symbolism there). The long and short of the matter is that Banderas and his fellow rent-a-cops decide to defend the young lass once they know the story and once Banderas knows that these guys are not giving up the ghost without getting that damn brat. The rest of the film is a classic cat and mouse game between Banderas using his acquired skills as a warrior prince to deflect every move that Kingsley and his frankly incompetent minions attempt. In the end you know two things without seeing the film-Kingsley is falling down and that bedraggled urchin will be saved to testify against the bad guys. Save this one for a snowy evening.   

*(Some older writers here have on occasion at the water cooler and in their pieces alluded to their own problems coming back from Vietnam including drug usage, divorce, and homelessness one writing a whole slew of stories about a bunch of returning Vietnam vets who found solace for a while as what were called “brothers under the bridges,” guys who lived under the bridges, along the railroad track and near the arroyos in Southern California in what in the old days were called “hobo jungles” but were more like alternative communities from what I have read about them.)