Security

  Security is an American B-movie shot in Bulgaria by a French-Canadian director with a Spanish protagonist and a British villain. It doesn't really distinguish itself on the action front from many other DTV movies, but it's a fun take on the Die Hard formula - or maybe Assault on Precinct 13, since the criminals don't control the mall for much of the movie - with likeable protagonists and just enough personality to make it enjoyable.

 Eduardo Deacon (Antonio Banderas) has hit a rough spot after returning from the Middle East - his introduction at a job centre, where some unspoken issues with his psychiatric evaluation make him hard to employ, is excellent: It gives him good action bonafides (he made captain and did three consequent tours), establishes the stakes (he's nearly broke, has an estranged wife and daughter) and his personality traits (humble and willing to do whatever it takes to pull through)... plus, it's just a good, empathetic scene all around. The movie puts its best foot forward, and I honestly don't know how well it'd work if it had botched this part or if it had chosen a more standard action scene to kick things off. Well done, movie.
 In any case: after some back and forth and some begging, Deacon manages to land a minimum-wage job as a night watchman in a mall in a some nearby-ish shitty neighbourhood.

 His luck, meagre as it is, doesn't hold. That same night, the USA Marshalls Service (yeah, I know, their spelling, not mine!) is transferring a state witness on a convoy when they get hit by a team of criminals that operate with military precision and are somehow able to jam both police scanners and cell signals. All the feds are killed, but the witness - Jamie (Katherine de la Rocha), a little girl - is able to escape into the woods.

 As that's going on Deacon is getting inducted at the new job by Vance (Liam McIntyre, a pompadoured and be-sidemuttoned jackass who's all but coded to be annoying. As it turns out the mall is located between two meth-stricken urban wastelands, so the overnight security team is three people plus Ruby (Gabriella Wright), whose deal isn't really clear but she seems to crash in the security room to sleep off her hangovers often enough that they're all used to it.

 Jamie reaches the mall and runs into Deacon just as he's completing his first rounds of the night - and conveniently passes out in his arms. As the team discuss what they're going to do with her, someone else pops up outside and... oh shit, it's Ben Kingsley! He first tries to trick them into giving the girl to him, then he tries to bribe them into it, and finally he threatens to kill every single one of them when they refuse his terms.

 And that's it: Our small team of mall cops (plus Ruby) need to protect Jamie from a couple dozen highly trained mercs. They refreshingly almost immediately rally behind Deacon to lead them, which is just common sense but I was dreading some head-butting, especially when the script foreshadowed that Vance might put up some resistance.
 As it turns out one of them has experience with explosives because... the internet, Ruby knows how to shoot a bow, Vance knows his way around guns, etcetera - all stuff that will come in useful later. A couple other plot points are carefully seeded (Vance has a gun on his truck in the parking outside, there's a trike in the show floor that's apparently really fun to drive..) and I'm happy to say the script (by Tony Mosher and John Sullivan) duly follows up on them.

 The action is not that great - this is firmly in the direct-to-video quality bracket, and Desrochers is no Jessee V. Johnson or John Hyams. On the other hand, it is better than some of the action that did make it to the cinemas at around the same time (like, say, London Has Fallen).
 There's some hand-to-hand combat, a lot of shootouts, a couple explosions, clever use of home-alone style traps and even a little vehicular action. It knows enough to add some colorful villains for our heroes to fight, including MMA vet Cung Le in a pretty fun main henchman role.

 There's a lot of posing, but no follow through - so you'll get a really good scene of, say, Banderas sliding through the floor shooting guns akimbo, but it's all close shots and poorly edited so it's not really fluid. At least the posing itself looks pretty cool.

 The dialog is clunky, but it succeeds in making the characters likeable and has some good moments - I liked the way one of Deacon's co-workers (Chad Lindberg) reacted to killing someone for the first time; yeah, it tracks. Kingsley scores a few cool lines as well towards the end, when he's trying to turn the girl to his side, or maybe just trying to get a reply so he can shoot her. Either way, it's fun.
 But the movie belongs to Banderas, who blesses a very likeable character with a great, soulful performance. There's a bit of formulaic feel-good shit in his relationship with Jamie, but it's ok, Banderas earns it.