If the question ever arose in your mind, what if someone decides to make a Terminator movie, imbues the murder machine with old-school uncanny valley aesthetics like that of the doll from Squid Game, and adds the menacing sluggishness of slasher movie villains? then the answer will be Neil Mackay’s Armed. Essentially a homage to 80s and 90s campy slasher movies, Armed is extremely basic when it comes to plot development, and despite following every stereotypical visual cue involved with such genre movies, it manages to pack a punch through overall treatment. The budgetary constraint is noticeable from the VFX, but the sense of survival dread captured through an atmospheric treatment thanks to cinematographer Martin Wisniewski allows a stronger immersion.
Spoilers Ahead
How Did The Heist Crew Find The Killer Robot?
Armed opens in Michigan in 1997, as a crew of disgruntled Iraq War ex-Marines, consisting of Bill Mosley, Chuck Reardon, and Frank Baxter, plan to rob a warehouse to get their hands on the latest army weapons stashed there. Stan Morley, an operative working in the warehouse, is their source of intel as they plan to sell stolen weapons to Arab buyers—who are potential terrorists. The reason as to why committing a national treason of such scale is no issue to them is unfortunate, as much like the majority of the country’s war vets, the trio too had to take part in operations that tested their humanity, and after retirement they were neglected by the state machinery and at present feel no qualm in betraying their country. The plan is to rob the warehouse, meet with the Arab buyers at a rendezvous point, sell the weapons, and wait near an old construction site to get airlifted by one of their contacts, Bennette Myers.
While stealing the weapons, the crew also unknowingly takes a crate that contains an experimental killer robot created by the Defense Intelligence Agency. As Chuck gets curious seeing light and sound emanating from the crate, he opens it, and the robot, now activated, attacks him at once. Petrified, Chuck empties his handgun on the automaton, which appears unharmed and disappears in the wilderness. As usual in these situations, his buddies have a hard time believing his words. After they find no one to be lurking in the woods, they find a manual along with Vietnam War-era cassettes, the contents of which remain unknown. The robot, made during the Vietnam War and not sentient by any means, has some basic programs coded about detecting enemies, which makes it wary of the activities of the heist crew. The robot observes and records from the woods when the Arabs meet with the crew to buy the stolen weapons. Things go horribly bad when it is revealed that the crew hasn’t been able to live up to the expectation of their buyers, and following a tense moment, a gunfight ensues, which results in the death of all the present members of the buyer’s team and Stan Morley. One of the members of the buyer’s team tries to escape in the woods, only to get brutally disemboweled by the robot. The surviving three members of the crew, confused as to who might have killed the said member, decide to flee and escape to the construction area, taking the money brought by the buyers, and wait for extraction as the news of their exploits soon becomes public. A patrol cop arrives at the crime scene where the gunfight took place, only to get killed by the robot, who takes the car and arrives at the construction site by somehow tracking the crew. Perhaps the recording it had of their previous interactions helped the robot to locate them using some nifty old-age army tracking mechanism.
Did Anyone Survive the Robot’s Mayhem?
On the other hand, the crew comes across a paraplegic war veteran, Boyd Lee Simpson, who momentarily tries to take control of the situation by holding Bill at gunpoint but gives up when Frank has him cornered. They don’t kill him, perhaps because as war veterans, they are able to sympathize with him. As the robot arrives in a cop car, the crew gets alarmed and almost tries to take it down, until Chuck advises Bill not to make it aware of their presence. However, the robot already knows that the crew is present at the place, and following its directive of eliminating enemies and traitors, it has decided to take down all of them. The robot attacks Franj but flees after Bill shoots at it. Although, it appears that the punctures in its hydraulic system can be repaired by the robot itself. Situations go from bad to worse as Bennett’s extraction plan gets botched up due to communication failure. Which means the crew members have to survive the wrath of a killer robot through the night, all the while avoiding possible detection by the authorities.
Boyd, who turns out to be not a cripple after all, tries to make a run for it, taking the stolen money, only to have his car bulldozed and toppled by the robot, who later stomps him to death. The trio plays the videocassette and learns that aside from being a seemingly unstoppable killing machine, the robot is a bomb in disguise. The army considered it better to simply just stash it away instead of dismantling it. Before they can decide their future course of action, Chuck, who is possibly suffering from PTSD, starts acting erratically. His guilt of committing treason, coupled with past trauma and fear of the robot, convinces him Bill and Frank are planning to turn on him and are secretly working for authorities. In a desperate attempt to escape his fate, Chuck takes a dynamite stick from the site’s storage and tries to blow up the stolen money, but the robot manages to sneak up on him, and in front of his friends, brutally dismembers Chuck to death.
Panic sets in the minds of Bill and Frank, who decide to take a last stand against the robot and destroy it. However, their strategy of remaining separate while luring the robot proves ineffectual, as Frank gets attacked and decapitated by the robot. Bill, the only survivor, tries his desperate best to escape and engages in a gunfight with the robot. Bill gets cornered inside a room and, in an injured state, loses his senses. But due to the energy system quickly depleting, the robot takes a long break, and waking up, Bill tries to flee from the site with the money at his disposal. He sets up a trap outside the site using grenades, anticipating the robot following him in the same direction.
What Happened to the Killer Robot?
Bill’s plan works perfectly, as the robot ends up triggering the trap and gets blown up—but given it had a strong armored exterior, it merely gets separated limb by limb instead of getting fully destroyed. With there being no chance of getting chased by the killer robot any longer, Bill takes the money and starts walking through the woods. However, the next morning he is caught by a police officer of the Oakland County Police Department and is brought to the police station for questioning. Coincidentally, the officers have also brought the parts of the robot, which is still functional, and recognizing Bill as one of the enemies/traitors it was trying to hunt down, the robot ends up triggering the bomb inside it.
In Armed’s ending, the explosion takes down fifty people at once, as the police station is set ablaze within moments. Bill isn’t able to escape his fate; like a nemesis, the killer robot has caught up to him at the end. In the final moments of the movie, news reports term the incident as a terror attack, portraying Bill and the rest of his heist crew associates as terrorists who threatened national security.
