Do you recall the last time you saw a contemporary-set movie with a major scene in a mall? Though there are still plenty of malls in America (and of America), in many areas they’re not exactly the bustling retail hubs they once were, reflected in the fact that they tend to appear in movies most prominently to broadly evoke the 1980s, especially in superhero movies like Wonder Woman 1984 (which opens on a Superman II-esque mall scene) or X-Men: Apocalypse (which cut down a longer mall montage for time, much to fans’ dismay). For the most part, this is the kind of gradual, society-reflecting shift that might not gather much notice; mall scenes tended to be most prominent in teen movies, anyway. But maybe viewers have been feeling that absence more acutely than anyone expected, because the little-known 2017 action thriller Security, set almost entirely inside a mall, has vaulted into the Netflix Top 10.
It’s not unusual for a straightforward action movie with a recognizable brand-name lead – in this case, Antonio Banderas, with a side of disengaged Ben Kingsley – to make a bigger splash on Netflix than it did in theaters. But Security is notable because this isn’t a forgotten post-millennial theatrical release finding a second life as newly licensed streamer content, just as movies did on cable in the past. Despite its mall setting, the movie didn’t ride the brief, strange wave of mall-cop movies that appeared in theaters back in 2009; it’s a 2017 movie that was barely released in theaters at all. In fact, it hit Netflix its year of release, though it’s unclear as to whether it’s been on the service the whole time, virtually undiscovered. It creates a sensation not unlike walking through your nearest mall for the first time in a while: Wait, was this always here?
As far as mall movies go, Security isn’t an especially impressive evocation of shiny, centralized consumer culture. It’s basically a straight-faced cross between those 2009 mall comedies, Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Observe and Report. From Blart, it takes the general idea of putting a Die Hard situation in a shopping center, with a bunch of gun-toting villains matched against mall-employee underdogs. It also (probably unintentionally) inverts Observe, in that instead of a security guard who is dangerously overzealous and incompetent in his thwarted desire to be a real cop, the movie gives us Eddie Deacon (Banderas), an overqualified military man who takes a mall-security gig out of desperation. He’s then forced into action when a young girl (Katherine Mary de la Rocha), a witness in an organized crime case, seeks refuge in the mall after-hours, following an ambush on the U.S. Marshals escorting her to the trial.
So yeah, Die Hard’s limited-location cat-and-mouse with a few of Taken’s older-guy-ass-kicking-in-defense-of-the-youth moves. The most surprising thing about Security is how it veers into mall-cop antics introducing the rest of the security team – the dopey, overconfident leader; the nerdy coward; the mouthy but tough broad; the earnestly helpful guy – and then goes on to treat those characters with relative dignity, rather than turning them into canon fodder. I mean, they are that, too; Banderas certainly isn’t the one who’s going to get killed in the first hour to raise the stakes. But there’s something weirdly novel about watching sitcom-level characters actually figure out how to fortify the defenses in their workplace, and eliminates the slasher-movie efficiency that action heroes sometimes take on when they become one-man armies.
Security is watchable, forgettable, mostly predictable stuff, but the area where it most noticeably falls down is finding some kind of point of view on an institution that hasn’t been thriving in recent years. Paul Blart puts its blinders on, turning the mall into a sitcom playground, subject of semi-ironic but lovingly photographed neat stuff, befitting the product-placement-loving Happy Madison productions. (It’s a shock that Adam Sandler hasn’t yet produced a movie where a C-list comedian gets sucked into a catalog.) Observe and Report relocates Taxi Driver from the streets of New York to the mall corridors of New Mexico, finding them just as hospitable a cesspool to pollute the human psyche. (Weirdly, Security implies that Eddie, like Seth Rogen’s character in Observe and Report, might have problems with his psych evaluation, though Eddie seems relatively restrained for a lone-wolf action hero.)
Perhaps the most famous mall-set movie, the original Dawn of the Dead from 1978, is a landmark satire of consumerist instincts. By comparison, Security is more like the Dawn of the Dead from 2004, a mall movie with nothing to say about its setting beyond its logistical advantages when fighting off a pack of marauding bad guys (be they zombies or utterly expendable henchmen). This one doesn’t even use a particularly convincing mall set; the exterior shots look much bigger than the interiors, the ceilings don’t seem to be high enough, and the characters seem to be constantly rounding the same handful of corners. There’s no sense of whether this is a mall where lots of people go, a mall where people used to go, or something on the downslope in between the two.
Of course, that doesn’t much affect the story of Antonio Banderas dispatching heavily armed gang members, or his colleagues forging makeshift weapons from the raw materials of commerce. Or at least, not beyond the subtext that the mall-security employees are actually being called upon to protect something real, rather than the illusion of community. Lots of activity that once happened at malls has now been transferred online – not just shopping, but the capturing of cultural ephemera not designed to have much lasting impact beyond momentary distraction. In the mall of Netflix, Security feels like something they found in the back and were surprised to see belatedly flying off the shelves.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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