DEN OF THIEVES 2: PANTERA. Even on those evenings when the seemingly endless expanse of streaming options is without appeal, a heist movie will reliably hit the spot. Variations on the plotting, execution and fallout of an elaborate theft all please in their turn: twisty confidence games for the puzzle minded; stylish capers with tuxedos and vaults; comic fumbling after jewels (it’s always a good night for the 1988 classic A Fish Called Wanda); intense dramas with optional noir shadows; and, of course, cops-and-robbers action. Where else is it as easy to slip into rooting for the criminals and revel in the vicarious enjoyment of doing wrong against a mark who can afford it? As the increasingly relevant cliché goes, it’s the bank’s money, not yours. An ensemble heist movie offers the dual work-related fantasies of joining a perfectly tuned team of people at the top of their game and of never going to work again. As the scheme unfolds, we are, to varying degrees, in on the shenanigans or duped, occasionally unaware of who the real players are until the end.
Directed by Christian Gudegast, who also shares writing credit, the original Den of Thieves (2018) is a sweaty, testosterone-forward actioner solidly in the cops-and-robbers heist subgenre. Gerard Butler plays menacing, perpetually hungover Big Nick O’Brien, a spiraling Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detective whose baked ham complexion leads one to worry nearly as much about his blood pressure as his adversarial relationship with civil rights. His counterpart Ray Merriman (tattooed obelisk Pablo Schreiber) heads a crew of heavily armed and armored bank robbers (only slightly more nefarious than Nick and his deputies) planning to rob the Federal Reserve Bank. Bartender/getaway driver Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) is caught between Nick and Merriman as they circle one another and square off in mostly pointless exchanges. The finished product, awash in chest puffing, decorative strippers, bullet casings and the occasional gay joke, comes off like a remake of Heat (1995) commissioned by Joe Rogan. The action is well choreographed enough but it wears until the only surprise is that none of the men bleed straight Monster energy drink.
The creatine dosage is significantly turned down in the sequel, which will likely be a disappointment for fans of the original. But as over the top as the first offering was, that movie had a clear lane, while Pantera is all over the place in terms of tone and pacing, flailing between three or four heist genres and succeeding at none.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera picks up with Donnie in Belgium, working with Eastern European members of the Pantera gang, suited up for a tarmac plane robbery that scores him and his operations manager Jovanna (Evin Ahmad) a pink diamond the size of a jawbreaker. Back in L.A., Nick, newly divorced and unemployed, is no longer circling but firmly in the drain. Still smarting from Donnie evading arrest/extrajudicial execution, he follows an illegally obtained lead and heads to France in Ugly American mode to pursue a hunch that Donnie is at work in Nice, where the World Diamond Center (relocated from Antwerp, presumably for beach vibes) is the gang’s next target. But rather than identifying Donnie for the local police, Nick, “tired of being the hunter,” threatens and cajoles his way into the gang for a piece of the action. However, while they work to wheedle their way into the WDC, they are nabbed by Italian mafia from whom, it turns out, Donnie stole the pink diamond, which they must now steal back and return.
Butler has been steadily cranking out action movies for more than two decades as a waxed Spartan, a clean-cut Secret Service agent, a soldier, an undercover operative and a disaster-evading dad, mostly without with his Scot’s burr but with regular success. He can carry an underwritten part, sell fight choreography and ramp up tension so that even the throwaway movies are worth a watch while folding laundry. But one doubts anyone could bear the weight of this mess. His bafflingly dumb speech about the symbiotic relationship between cops and criminals may have required the assistance of the Johnnie Walker on the table. Throughout, Butler seems to flounder between the dark and violent Nick of the first film and the man now shy about hitting a joint in a club and reveling in drunken antics and intimacies with Donnie, who’s evidently the first friend he’s ever made. (Though watching Butler shout, “Fuck NATO,” while downing shots and wobbling away from the club on a standing electric scooter may be worth the ticket price.)
Jackson is clearly overmatched; his gangster poker face is not enough to manage the leading role, and when he goes undercover as an African diamond dealer, one gets the feeling a single viewing of Black Panther wasn’t enough to nail the accent. Ahmad is solid in her role, as she was in the fun Netflix spy series Who is Erin Carter? in which she had far more room to stretch out.
The inescapable problem is the writing, the full credit for which goes to Gudegast, who seems, like too many directors, to either underestimate the difficulty of the task or overestimate the cost of hiring someone who can write. While the action sequences are exciting, even simple scenes of camaraderie and humor are thin and stilted, failing to establish character or chemistry. We don’t get a sense of the individual team members and their dramatic, conspiratorial meetings could all have been emails. Likewise, the build-up to the heist lacks tension and missed opportunities to raise the stakes or help us see the enormity of the obstacles are everywhere. (Reports of the real-life Antwerp robbery that inspired the plot are more exciting, honestly.) Instead, we lurch between hard-boiled action and goofy hijinks, nihilistic obsession and moral handwringing. Like a semester abroad, Pantera may have changed Nick and Donnie, but it’s not terribly interesting for the rest of us to hear about. R. 144M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the arts and features editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400, extension 320, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky and Instagram @JFumikoCahill.
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This article appears in ‘A Big Family’.
