SECURITY (NETFLIX) (2017)

SYNOPSIS: After taking a job as a mall security guard, a former Marine steps up to protect a young girl who's being hunted by heavily armed mercenaries. 

MOVIE REVIEW:

The production logline states that this is “Die Hard in a shopping mall”. For once, the marketing tagline is not that misleading from the final product. Security stars Antonio Banderas (The Legend of Zorro) as a grizzled, down-on-his-luck army veteran; Eddie Deacon who for some unexplained reason finds it hard to get a job after he got out of active service. The placement office at the last minute offers him an hourly paid security job at the local mall, which he willingly accepts.  

It looks liked one hell of a dead end job for Eddie as he is surrounded by a show off head of security Vance (Liam McIntyre from The Flash), nerd Mason (Chad Linberg from Supernatural), drunk Ruby (Gabriella Wright) and Johnny (Jiro Wang from Taiwanese boyband, Farenheit). But when a young girl from the FBI witness protection program pounds on the door asking for help in the dead of the night, Eddie must round up his ragtag group of colleagues to fight against a deadly mercenary team led by the evil Charlie (Ben Kingsley).

Similar to our recently reviewed Netflix’s Wheelman, Security is set entirely over the course of one rainy night. Budget is obviously limited, as the mall looks more liked a soundstage than an actual mall. Even a comedy liked Paul Blart: Mall Cop has better dressing. While the production value misses the mark, not all hopes are lost. Security is supported by a breakneck pacing, decent action sequences and director Alain Descrochers actually devoted enough screentime to the individual supporting characters despite the fact that you will likely know not all of them will survive past the ending credits.

Banderas seems to vanish from big-budgeted Hollywood titles nowadays but here he is putting in more than a decent performance as an ex-soldier suffering from PTSD, something which the script hints of, though never really delves into. Here’s looking at you, Bruce Willis. Sir Ben Kingsley huffs and puffs liked the big bad wolf from The Red Riding Hood doing his usual villainous outing and MMA fighter Cung Le (The Grandmaster) appears as Dead Eyes, one of Charlie’s henchmen who gets to battle Eddie in the finale.

For a DTV release, Security is surprisingly entertaining from start to finish. The violence on the whole is pretty restrained and action more grounded than over-the-top cheesy which many DTV releases suffered from and its leading man is perfectly cast opposite his young co-star, Katherine de la Rocha. Thus despite the unconvincing looking mall, all the other reasons made this B-movie a recommended watch. 

Review by Linus Tee