Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) turns the sugary cops-and-robbers cat-and-mouse Crunch Berries of its predecessor into Oops! All Robbers. Yep, olâ Big Nick, played with a big gut and plenty of grunts by a born-for-this Gerard Butler, switches sides for the sequel, forgoing chasing OâShea Jackson Jr.âs crook Donnie Wilson all over tarnation for a good old-fashioned if-you-canât-beat-âem-join-âem situation. Christian Gudegast returns to write and direct, capitalizing on the first filmâs quiet cult following (Den of Thieves grossed a modest-but-profitable $80 million in 2018) and the subsequent BUTLERNAISSANCE, where the world reassessed the kinda goofy action star after he starred in a few kinda good appreciate-them-for-what-they-are movies, including Greenland, Copshop and Plane (heâll soon be in a Greenland sequel (!) and a Julian Schnabel film (!!), so who says the guy ainât got range?). Anyway, befitting of its cultish status, DoT2 earned a decent $40 million and actually squeaked by with 61 percent on the Tomatometer, which feels about right.
DEN OF THIEVES 2: PANTERA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: ANTWERP. Jovanna (Evin Ahmad) is a flight attendant whoâs not really a flight attendant. No, sheâs orchestrating a scheme in which four gentlemen masquerading as cops â among them is our old friend Donnie (Jackson) â bait-and-switch a private-plane crew and snatch a stash of diamonds, including a really big red diamond. Now, before we get to the newly divorced, broke, sad and pathetic Big Nick, we should note how quaint and refreshingly old-school a movie about diamond thieves is. So many modern flicks are about art thieves or nuclear-code thieves. Diamonds! Itâs like the 1960s around here! Anyway, Big Nick: Heâs newly divorced, broke, sad and pathetic. He also just got canned from the Los Angeles Sheriffâs Dept. We catch up with him in the bathroom of the Los Angeles County Courthouse, where he slams his divorce papers into the waste bin and then when he bangs on the button of the hand dryer and it doesnât work, he rips it off the wall. I get it, man. Air dryers are bullshit. Paper towels never failed anyone. Ever!
We fully expect Big Nick to go home to a barely furnished crappy apartment thatâs littered with old Chinese food containers and empty booze bottles that heâs too depressed to clean up. But instead, he sees a news report about the diamond heist, threatens people for insider info and hops a plane to Nice, France, where Donnie and Jovanna have set up shop as legit gem dealers in the World Diamond Center. If youâre unfamiliar with the WDC, let it be known that itâs an entire multi-building city district, with offices and vaults and security guards and cameras staring everybody down at all times. In reality, itâs in Antwerp, and also in reality, a mega-heist occurred there in 2003, which, not a spoiler alert, inspired this movieâs screenplay.
So you wonât be surprised to hear that Donnieâs acquisition of the aforementioned very valuable gems gets him in the door so he can steal the living snot out of even more diamonds â consider it a seven-figure investment that, with a little work, will turn into eight or nine figures. Meanwhile, Big Nick shows up in France and to absolutely no oneâs surprise is the type of guy who says âFrench food kinda sucksâ to actual French people in France. Donnie comes home from a hard day at the office and finds Big Nick sitting at his dinner table. He got a little intel here and a little intel there and he knows what Donnieâs up to. But Big Nick ainât there for the reasons Donnie thinks. Big Nick is tired of being sad and broke. He could blow up the whole scheme, and uses that fact to leverage his way in. He looks Donnie straight in the eye and says, âYouâre gonna rob that place, and Iâm gonna do it with you.â
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Dens of Thieveses are like low-rent versions of Ronin or Heat â especially the action sequences â with bits of the Oceanâs films thrown in for flavoring.
Performance Worth Watching: Butler has always been Russell Crowe Lite, and both actors apparently have figured out that playing beer-gutted wiseasses late in their careers is fun. Crowe has the ability to turn junk like Land of Bad into something memorable, and the same goes for Gerry Buts with Pantera, who turns Big Nick into a walking sauerkraut-belch-in-church of a character â hilarious and a little bit unhinged. Heâs been reassessed by the world at large, and gone from punching bag to lovable galoot.
Memorable Dialogue: Big Nick, Donnie and the crew sit in a dimly lit warehouse space â the type that we see so often in crime movies that they must be officially sanctioned by the Hollywood Crime Movie Affiliates â making big heisty plans and dropping meta-references:
Big Nick: Fâ the police!
Donnie: (eyes widen, speechless)
Sex and Skin: Nah.
Our Take: DoT 2 doesnât need to be as interesting as it is. Note that I didnât say âgood,â because it would be âgoodâ even without the character development and setting exploration that we see in traditionally âgoodâ movies, and was simply a taut, suspenseful, slickly directed heist thriller. Which isnât to say Michael Mann will feel Gudegast breathing down his neck â letâs be real here. Gudegast isnât particularly interested in Saying Something, but he absolutely shows enough action-flick acumen in his ability to stage shootouts and car chases with practical effects, and a thoroughly detailed third-act sequence with all the M:I close shaves a movie mega-heist needs: treacherous rooftop crossings and scalings of elevator shafts, meticulous safecracking, cuts to security guards eyeballing monitors, torturous moments of silence.
The fun sneaky-stealy shit takes up most of the final hour, while the first 80 minutes loiters a bit, skewing ever so slightly more towards testing our patience than building tension â Dad Movie muscleheads might shift impatiently in their seats, waiting for Butler to start bashing heads. Gudegast allows himself to get a little bit distracted from the criminal tasks at hand and lets his cast take advantage of the comedic and lightly dramatic chemistry they possess. Most significantly, he lets Butler crash and bang around a bit, playing a guy whoâs transitioning from a thankless law-enforcement career to the exact opposite of that, which is bound to be psychologically messy. Thereâs stuff going on in the subtext of the performance, the likes of which we donât see often in Butler vehicles. The guy is witty in ways that just never emerged in poker-faced action junk like Gamer or Gods of Egypt, or across from Aniston and Heigl in putrid rom-coms.
Not that the movie aims to be anything more than a well-made distraction â itâs a zillion miles from relevance, and the throwback diamond-heist plot feels like purposeful distancing from anything resembling politics. Den of Thieves 2 is an enjoyable lark populated with characters who are more tangible than the usual genre dudes and dames, thus making their implausible adventures feel a little more plausible. The movie holds us in the moment, which is all we could ask for.
Our Call: Gudegast fulfills his modest ambitions with Den of Thieves 2. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Den of Thieves 2: Pantera’ on Netflix, in Which an Amusing Gerard Butler Anchors a Smarter-Than-Average Heist Flick appeared first on Decider.
