The first big wide-release movie of 2025 that’s not an expansion of a limited 2024 release arrives on January 10th, and it’s called Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. For certain movie fans, the very title of Den of Thieves 2 may quicken pulses. For others, it may foster understandable confusion about what the hell Den of Thieves is to begin with. After all, the first movie was released a full seven years ago, wayyyyy back in January of 2018. It was in the box office top five for a single week, and its domestic gross of $45 million placed it slightly above a Tyler Perry movie called Acrimony and slightly below a Jennifer Lawrence movie called Red Sparrow at the end of the year. Other 2018 titles that outgrossed Den of Thieves in these United States include the remake of Overboard, the alleged comedy Tag, and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. The only mainstream movie from that year with a lower gross to receive a direct sequel? Paddington 2, one of the most acclaimed movies of the year. Den of Thieves, starring Gerard Butler and 50 Cent, was not. And yet! Den of Thieves 2 is shaping up to be kind of a dad-movie event, at least among those who long for crime-movie programmers and Gerry Butler vehicles. If you haven’t caught up with the first movie yet, maybe tonight’s the night! Per the Max charts, it seems like plenty of others are jumping in (or plenty of fans are firing up a rewatch).
Why watch Den of Thieves tonight?
Who doesn’t love heist movies? That’s basically what Den of Thieves is – although in plot terms, it’s more akin to Heat, which is more of a “Los Angeles crime saga,” as the old 1995 poster said, than a movie about a caper. In fact, Den of Thieves is quite akin to Heat, specifically; it’s gained a reputation as a dirtbag knockoff of that Michael Mann movie that brought together Robert De Niro, as a veteran thief pulling off one last major score, and Al Pacino, as a veteran cop intent on stopping De Niro’s crew. Thieves casts Gerard Butler in the Al Pacino role, and if you think that sounds low-rent, wait until you see Pablo Schreiber take on the De Niro part, with O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Ice Cube’s son!) and 50 Cent among those on his crew.
Ah, but there’s the clever bit: Schreiber plays a lead character in the movie, but in order to twist the material into a more heist-friendly direction, Jackson has probably just as much screen time as a lower-level driver who gets identified by Butler’s crew, and therefore gets caught in the middle of this epic cops-and-criminals-two-sides-of-the-same-coin thing. In order to feint toward the epic scope of the latter, Den of Thieves does feel the need to sprawl out – it runs well over two hours – and I daresay screenwriter-turned-director Christian Gudegast doesn’t exactly know what to do with that extra running time. Heat fills its 165 minutes with compelling side characters and richly sad personal lives for its lead characters. Den of Thieves, on the other hand, offers Butler a don’t-take-the-kids divorce subplot that amounts to several protracted yet mostly pointless scenes; and, on the criminal side, there’s a creepy moment where 50 Cent takes his daughter’s sweet-seeming date aside and uses his crew of criminals to threaten him. You know, like that horrible scene in Bad Boys II! It’s as if Gudegast took a look at some of the Heat subplots and thought: How would a dumbass whose lines aren’t supplied by Michael Mann deal with this?
Yet that does become part of the movie’s charm; while these moments aren’t as rich in atmosphere as similar, less stupid scenes in Heat, they do give a sense of what these characters are up to in between all of the heist-planning and automatic-weapon shooting. Moreover, there’s classic heist-picture style to the way that certain crucial information is withheld and doled out; the most familiar cop-movie shtick gives way to some genuine cleverness in the second half, while staying grounded enough to feel at least vaguely believable.
At the center is Butler as “Big Nick” O’Brien, one of his best roles because it really leans into his coarseness in a way that becomes strangely likable – maybe because Big Nick, unlike his Heat counterpart, doesn’t seem tortured by his job. Mostly, he seems to genuinely enjoy it. It’s everything else he has trouble with. Not the most original crime-movie conceit, but one that Butler plays especially well, and if Schreiber doesn’t exactly counter with a similar joy of performance, Jackson’s presence is winning enough to compensate. He has a driver-demo scene that plays like a Fast & Furious audition that didn’t quite pan out, and in a lot of ways Den of Thieves also resembles that series with a somewhat different ratio of crime-movie juice, B-picture sincerity, and action absurdity. Also like a Fast entry, it would have been perfectly at home at a late 1950s drive-in. Streaming it at home can be the next-best thing.
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.
The post What Movie Should I Watch Tonight? ‘Den of Thieves’ on Max appeared first on Decider.
