Not to come down too hard on Christian Gudegast’s gritty, 2018 crime flick, but possibly the most overwhelming twist that came out of that film is that it’s managed to somehow wrangle out a sequel that no one truly expected. It’s not that the first Den was a bad film – it’s actually a fairly watchable heist flick featuring a typically swaggering Gerard Butler performance – but once the end credits rolled, it tended to dissipate out of the folds of your brain like steam coming of a hot, bald head on a cold, winter morning.
Still, forgettable or not, Big Nick O’Brien and his amusingly toxic attitude to police work is back on the trail of tricksy planner Donnie Wilson as the franchise moves out of the grimy streets of LA and into the far more picturesque surroundings of Nice, France. But can a change of scenery give this budding franchise the edge it needs to make it become more than just another Heat also-ran?
Not long after the events of the first Den Of Thieves, we rejoin Donnie Wilson as he continues to concoct yet another audacious heist, this time in Antwerp, Belgium as he and a newly formed crew called the Panthers steal a red diamond from an airport while dressed as SWAT. However, while Donnie is out there in the world doing his thing, back in LA, Nick O’Brien, aka. the cop he managed to completely bamboozle, has decidedly seen better days. His hard living lifestyle and abrasive temperament has finally seen his marriage fully collapse and to add insult to injury, the LA Sheriff’s Department has put him on leave.
However, never one to take defeat sitting down for long, Nick heads over to France on a professional hunch and manages to seek out Donnie while the career criminal is in the midst of plotting his next job to hit the World Diamond Centre with the Panther Crew. However, rather than looking for some sort of payback, Nick manages to flip the script when he admits he’d rather join then that beat them and requests (rather forcibly) that he wants to join the gang and make some real money. The Pather Crew are mostly OK with this and Nick gets close in particular with crew leader, Jovanna, as he bonds with them quickly thanks to the help of a night out on the town and a handy dose of ecstasy.
However, things get infinitely more complicated when the Calabrian Mafia get involved. Why, would they give a shit? Because remember that red diamond that the crew stole? It belonged to a mob boss who carries the rather disconcerting name of the Octopus and he wants it back or some real bad shit will undoubtedly happen.
In a stroke of luck, the diamond is being stored in the World Diamond Center they’re plotting to rob and so what started as the heist of a lifetime becomes a heist for their lives. But even though he’s become rather chummy with his new, criminal, companions, can Nick, or Donnie for that matter, be trusted?
Before we get started, I feel like I have to salute screenwriter and director Gudegast for definitely trying something new, rather than retreading the same path of simply doing Heat by way of the sweaty, tattooed look of a urban, David Ayer thriller. Gone are the cholos in vests and the twisted police politics and in its place, the director has ironically switched his style up to be more in line with Michael Mann as he drops some of the more absurd machismo for a more refined Euro-heist. Thus the hard, jagged edges of a bunch of grizzled ex-military, ex-cons king head to head with a law bending team of cops get sanded down into something a bit more refined and slick as the entire tone of the original is swapped out almost completely. However, while the first Den Of Thieves may have not been one of the all time greats of modern crime epics, it’s that slightly sleazy LA feel that was actually the most endearing thing about it, in in an attempt to do something different, the filmmakers strangely only succeed in making the sequel even more nondescript that before and if you had changed up some of the character names, people might not even realised it was a follow up.
Still, O’Shea Jackson Jr. seems to be getting a major kick from letting his character grow from the previous, urban setting as Donnie now gets to put on various accents and attempt various meetings with suits rather than serving drinks in a scummy bar in order to get his intel. However, we don’t really get to know much more about the guy that we already did in the first film as the movie seems way more eager to delve into its new status quo than into either the heads of its returning or new characters. In fact, almost all of the new characters aren’t actually serviced at all, with barely any of them – even Evin Ahmad’s gang leader – getting the same level of charactisation as Pablo Schreiber from the first film.
Of course, this doesn’t stop Gerard Butler from having an obviously fun time while he does his thing and most of the fun of Den Of Thieves 2 comes from him being the same, belligerent, cocky prick he was before while taking him slightly out of the character’s comfort zone. So while the first film basically had him strutting around the place, challenging everyone’s masculine energy with gay jokes and slumping in chairs like he owned the fucking place, the sequel has him try and has him get under the skin of French police by deliberately mispronouncing “croissant” at every given opportunity and getting off his hairy, inked tits on ecstasy and dad dancing at a nightclub. To be fair, Butler’s “don’t give a fuck” attitude to the films he does and how he does them has always been massively amusing to me, but even I have to admit that if the most memorable moments of your crime film is him throwing shapes in a green Hawaiian shirt, something may have gone slightly wrong.
While all the robbery stuff is pretty standard, most standard robbery stuff on film ends up still being pretty watchable even though you can’t help but wonder that with all the huffing and puffing that’s going on during the heist, maybe these diamond thieves need to take their ill gotten gains and invest themselves in a gym membership. However, we do manage to get a last act car chase that’s fun and a final twist that’s still effective enough without coming utterly out of the blue, but I can’t help but wonder if Gudegast’s epic has possibly shot itself in the foot due to its tone change.
You see while it’s always a good thing when a filmmaker chooses to stretch their skills, I can also see die hard fans of all the cop/robbers stuff from the original being a little put out now that the franchise has seemingly moved out of the slums and on to more up-market pastures. But shift to more standard crime thriller aside, Butler amusing dedication to the whole “scumbag cop” thing makes Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera far more arresting than it actually is.
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