I believe it was a wise man who once said “You come at the king, you best not miss” (it was Omar from The Wire in case you were wondering) and even it comes to cinematic, cops and robbers epics, they don’t come much more regal that Michael Mann’s virtually perfect Heat, a movie that’s easily kept tight hold of its crown since 1995. However, while other crime operas have everything in their power to take the throne, in 2018, the most obvious challenger to date tackled the champ head on by attempting to use it’s own basic plot against it. Brass balls doesn’t even cover it.
The film was Christian Gudegast’s Den Of Thieves and it also used the premise of focusing on a group of highly trained and motivated armed robbers while simultaneously tracking the lives of the flawed men of the law who are trying to take them down; but with a few other bells and whistles thrown in for good measure. Can the sight of Gerald Butler and Pablo Schreiber going head to head possibly measure up to what as come before? If it can, it would be the heist of the century.
Ray Merrimen is a jacked up, professional robber who leads a team of fellow ex-MARSOC Marines to perform audacious heists and after their last job leaves a clutch of the LAPD’s finest riddled with bullets, it’s time for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to swoop in and take these guys down. But while Merrimen is a no nonsense pro who has kept his edge razor sharp – even after a stint in prison – his opposite number, the sneering, swaggering Detective “Big Nick” O’Brian is similarly dedicated to his punishing job. Shrugging off a disintegrating marriage caused by the the hard living lifestyle he’s adopted, he and his team get to work nailing this lawless group and they manage to find an “in” with the gang’s wheel man, Donnie Wilson, and they immediately start leveraging him on info about his highly trained companions.
However, Merrimen has a rather sizable score on the horizon that will see him and his devoted group attempt the white whale of all heists when they decide to target the Federal Reserve, a building that’s not only ridiculously tough to rob, but virtually impossible to plan for as the security is so extreme they’ll nab you for even loitering a street away. As Big Nick and his boys race to get enough intel to lock down their prey, Merriman is prepping his team to do the score of a lifetime.
But on the day, a number of inconsistencies occur that threaten to trip Big Nick up and it soon becomes apparent that not everything is as it seems and twist follows twist. But when the guns are drawn and the inevitable clash looms, who will walk away with the money and who will walk away with their life?
If I had to call it, I’d have to say that Den Of Thieves is trying to be Heat for a generation hungrily consuming energy drinks and endless playings of GTA 5 as it ditches a lot of Michael Mann’s artful nuances in favour of musular tattoos and intense machismo. But where Heat also took great pains to give almost everyone on both sides of the law backstories, arcs and a third dimension, Gudegast instead purely seems interested in keeping things noticably more simple. Sticking to the two opposing tribes of both police and criminal and having them headed by two utterly dedicated men who have devoted their lives to these worlds, the bare bones of Mann’s thriller is still there for all to see, but he only really seems to be interested in fleshing out a handful of characters, leaving the vast majority as stereotypical heavies who talk tough and drink heavy.
Taking point of the whole enterprise is the burly, but always welcome form of Gerard Butler who seems to have approached the entire role of Big Nick by only watching the scene in Heat where bug eyed Al Pacino screams “GREAT ASS” at a visibly traumatised Hank Azaria and decided that he was going to do that for two and a half hours. While he never quite reaches the height of manic butt appreciation of Pacino, Butler is obviously having a great deal of fun making his character as much of a swaggering, confrontational alpha male prick as he can as his entire brand of police work seems to just openly stalk the criminals he’s tracking. In fact, a whole other movie could have been fashioned from a movie where a cop interjects himself so deeply in his quarry’s life he not only shows up at the guy’s family functions at restaurants and his usual shooting range, he even goes as far as having sex with Merrimen’s girlfriend. But while Butler is getting a kick out of bring as much sleezebag as he can to the movie, Pablo Schreiber takes the more measured role of Merrimen with the same, grave quietness he would eventually give to Master Chief in the much lamented Halo show. But while he does a good job with fixing everyone with a steely glare while looking imposing as fuck in a vest, the guy is such a badass, the movie neglects to give him or Butler any real sense of self or vulnerabilities to play with.
Sure, Big Nick is sad that his wife has taken the kids, but it doesn’t really affect the story at all, so it doesn’t really give the audience anything to get behind other than “these guys are tough as nails”. However, sitting somewhere in the middle is O’Shea Jackson Jr. whose character is literally being torn between the two groups as he’s leveraged by one side to snitch on the other, but an ending that seems strip mined from The Usual Suspects was supposedly meant to add depth to Donnie, but instead feels more left-field for the sake of it than an interesting wrinkle for the character.
No doubt mileage may vary when it comes to how much you can tolerate the constant macho talk and posturing, but taken on its own merit, while Den Of Thieves is hardly groundbreaking, I did find it effortlessly fun to watch as everyone goes through the gritty crime movie motions even though I wasn’t particularly emotionally invested in a single character involved. Of course, no Heat rip off would be complete without a blazing shoot out to sort out the men from the boys and even though it falls way short of the iconic trading of gunfire that made the legendary movie so special, it still proves to be a nicely rip roaring finale for those caught up in the sweaty drama. The bullets fly thick and fast and characters start dropping like flies and it’s a nice touch that these guys are so desperate to bring each other down, they engage in their battle to the death in the midst of a civilian stuffed traffic jam.
Some will dismiss Den Of Thieves as nothing more than an overly muscled carbon copy that swaps bulging biceps and testosterone fueled trash talk for brains, but as such things go, it’s still pretty damn watchable and watching Butler chew the scenery like he’s getting paid by the insult is always good value for money.
It sure ain’t Heat – but it’s still definitely warm…
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