‘Den of Thieves 2: Pantera’ Adds International Flavor for Surprisingly Strong Results

January 10, 2025

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A couple of Panteras (CREDIT: Rico Torres)

Starring: Gerard Butler, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Evin Ahmad, Salvatore Esposito, Meadow Williams, Swen Temmel, Michael Bisping, Orli Shuka, Cristian Solimeno, Nazmiye Oral, Yasen Zates Atour, Giuseppe Schillaci, Dino Kelly, Rico Verhoeven, Velibor Topic, Antonio Bustorff, Cyril Gane

Director: Christian Gudegast

Running Time: 144 Minutes

Rating: R for Guns, Fists, Bad Words, and a Few Hits of E

Release Date: January 10, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Detective Nicholas O’Brien (Gerard Butler) might go by the nickname “Big Nick,” but they oughta call him Ahab, considering the white whale he just can’t let go of. That Moby Dick would be Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), who bested Big Nick and the city of Los Angeles several years ago with a twisty heist, and now he’s arrived in France for his next big score. But Nick is hot on his tail, and it looks like he wants to … help him out? It’s true, or at least it seems that way, as he embeds himself right within Donnie’s crew and talks a big game about abandoning the rule of law. Or, you know, it could be that he’s just finally decided to flex his undercover entrapment skills.

What Made an Impression?: Well, the first thing that made an impression is that I actually kinda liked Den of Thieves 2. Or at the very least I thought it was an improvement over the original Den, which felt like it was cosplaying more acclaimed urban American crime sagas. But Pantera manages to be its own thing by sprucing itself up on a whole new continent. The two-hour plus runtime feels more patient than indulgent, with writer-director Christian Gudagest confidently assembling various factions on his sprawling chess board. The dialogue is a lot less clever than the plotting, but at least there’s a certain self-aware charm to Butler’s macho-overload bluntness at this point in his career.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is Recommended If You Like: Cheap vibes crossed with high production values

Grade: 3 out of 5 Diamonds

This Is a Movie Review: ‘Den of Thieves’ is a Warmed-Over, Mush-Mouthed Michael Mann Impersonation

January 19, 2018

jmunney Cinema, Movie Reviews , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

CREDIT: STX

This review was originally published on News Cult in January 2018.

Starring: Gerard Butler, Pablo Schreiber, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Evan Jones, Cooper Andrews, Dawn Olivieri

Director: Christian Gudegast

Running Time: 140 Minutes

Rating: R for Cacophonous Continuous Gunfire, a Strip Club Detour, and Way Too Many F-Bombs

Release Date: January 19, 2018

According to the opening titles of Den of Thieves, Los Angeles is the “bank robbery capital of the world.” I do not know if that title is actually true, partly because this movie does not make me care enough to confirm or debunk the claim. Besides, it is essentially immaterial to the plot. This is not about an epidemic of robberies, but one specific crew, who could be pulling off their big heist anywhere so long as the cash is present and an escape route is available. As for Gerard Butler’s performance as the cop doggedly tracking them, it does not scream “L.A.” so much as “nutso actor sheds any semblance of sanity.”

Den of Thieves is the directorial debut of Christian Gudegast, who previously scripted the likes of London Has Fallen (which I have not seen, but I have heard it is just as dreadful as its predecessor Olympus Has Fallen). Michael Mann’s influence on him is obvious, but not fruitful. Gudegast clearly wants this to be a sprawling crime saga on the same level as Heat or Miami Vice, but that would require characters who deliver personality instead of an endless string of groan-inducing f-bombs.

As Merriman, the leader of the den, Pablo Schreiber mostly relies on bulging out his facial muscles. As his right-hand man, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson basically stands off to the side and looks vaguely threatening. O’Shea Jackson Jr., as the team’s driver and newest recruit, is able to infuse the proceedings with a few amusing moments. (There is a running gag with a couple of randy female customers when he moonlights delivering Chinese food.) Meanwhile, the rest of the guys in the den are either too beefy or too masked to convey any tangible emotion.

But for better and for worse, this is the Gerard Butler show. His “Big Nick” is not so much corrupt or “flying off the handle” so much as he is filled with constant, fidgety, bizarre tics that do not resemble any sort of recognizable human behavior I am familiar with. I cannot say that any of his performance adds up to anything “good,” but I must admit that I could not look away.

Ultimately, the scheme wraps up with a series of twists that mostly serve to frustrate, not because they cheat with any internal logic, but because they require a great deal of patience to sit around before anything meaningful happens. At nearly two and a half hours, there is precious little to make that journey bearable. To be fair, the crowd I saw it was hooting and hollering throughout, so there clearly is an audience for this sort of muscled-up, unsubtle affair. But from my perspective, this is a dithering cacophony that drives me batty.

Den of Thieves is Recommended If You Like: Michael Mann’s crime sagas but without the visual and formal experimentalism, Training Day but with an unfathomable amount of scenery-chewing

Grade: 2 out of 5 Automatic Rounds