It feels like an eternity ago when you realize the first Den of Thieves released nearly seven years ago to the day. Perhaps the gusts of a second wind as the film was rediscovered throughout 2020 refreshed our memory of it. Recognized as “douchebag Heat” for Pepto Bismol slurping divorced Dads with a gut full of oily hibachi their gastrointestinal problems can’t work through, Den of Thieves was suddenly recalibrated into a quasi-cult favorite amongst action film acolytes. For a film that walked the line in being recognized as a high profile “direct to video” actioner, Den of Thieves was anything but a slouch at the box office. It turned a $50 million dollar profit on a $30 million dollar budget, reminded us of Gerard Butler’s on screen genius, and may have turned O’Shea Jackson Jr. into an actor worth keeping an eye on. But up until the film became a true hit a few years later, the original felt like a flash in the pan, ‘been there done that’, ‘let’s do Heat with a drunken stupor and no formal finesse’ with just enough potential for a sequel that kept the door open for more time with Big Nick and Donnie.
Now, with the money in place and the script they were looking for, director Christian Gudegast returns to direct the first major release of 2025, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. A sequel that finds O’Shea’s Donnie entangled with a rogue-like team of thieving European “Panthers” as Big Nick has tumbled into a shell of himself. Reintroduced to Donnie and his team with an overhead view of a heist executed without a single misstep juxtaposed with a view of Big Nick leaking into a urinal as a location card notes he’s at divorce court comfortably carries over the same tone as the predecessor. No longer in Los Angeles, Gudegast toys in Nice (pronounced “niece"), France. An Eastern French town off the coast of the Mediterranean that bears close resemblance to the neighboring port towns in Italy. Here is where Donnie and the Panthers intend to pull off a heist that robs the World Diamond Center of a precious diamond stashed in their vault. The premise has all the sizzle of a sequel rich with selling points - an international setting with a bigger, broader, wider-shouldered crew and a handful of parties interested in the precious cargo. Unfortunately, despite the fiscal returns justifying a second jab at this universe, the Den of Thieves-verse’s attempts at being a caustic reinterpretation of action movie canon is bloated with gases aching to be released.
If the first Den of Thieves film is ‘dudes rock’ Heat, then Den of Thieves 2 is going to draw plenty of comparisons to John Frankenheimer’s international chase thriller, Ronin (1998). Ronin, the Robert De Niro vehicle that also zooms throughout Nice, sees a collection of special forces vying for a valuable suitcase as loyalties shift throughout the crew’s melting pot of identities. Noted for its thrilling, realistic, and practically unmatched car chases that’ll make anyone that believed the car chase in The Batman was any good go into cardiac arrest, Ronin is the feather in the hat for one of America’s great filmmakers. Frankenheimer, who touched on loyalty and identity in the face of political allegiance maximized by high-octane thrills, brought it to a head with Natasha McElhone’s hair whipping against her face throughout Paris in a chase that wouldn’t be matched until 17 years later. Pantera may have some recognizable traits that makes the film share a likeness to Ronin and/or other vessels of action cinema, but this is all Pantera has going for it. Sure, there may be vulgar expressions that ‘separate’ this film from the faint synchronicities it has with the inspirations, but at the most fundamental level, Pantera can’t even breathe on its own.
After the stage-setting heist that catalyzes the film, Pantera is two acts worth of characters we’re already familiar with going through traditional storytelling tropes that exposit backstory to fill the gaps. For a film that seems to love the idea of letting the world exist without question, there is a lot of time spent kneading out information that doesn’t particularly reshape what we already know. Within the interludes of Big Nick and Donnie reconnecting between the heist, the blueprints are structured without a sense of urgency or shrinking perimeter of danger. Despite the additional parties at play in a larger sandbox, the story feels smaller. Which isn’t a totally unwelcome surprise, but there are no risks in how it deploys the conflict between the Panthers, the Italian mob, and Big Nick. There is so much information, and so little utilized to amplify the stakes.
Although both entries run beyond two hours, there is a notable regression in Gudegast’s ability to pace a story that wants to juggle sarcastic wit while attempting to balance the scales of dramatic outbursts of testosterone. With no shootouts, chases, or altering revelations for nearly two hours, the tension must come from the conversations. Yet the dialogue is done no favors either. In the story’s second major beat, Big Nick appears at Donnie’s pad to propose he join up with him and his crew. Donnie wields a gun Nick knows he won’t use, and when Nick turns the gun on him, O’Shea appears to crack a smile as if he was in on the social uplifting of Big Nick as a social media cine-icon. O’Shea is mostly great throughout the movie, but he appears to break character here and the immersion is muddled thereafter. Even if Heat’s diner scene is reinterpreted as a fated cop and robber sharing belly laughs about their past as their alcohol laced breath wafts with shawarma, there isn’t anything structurally informative about the moment besides it’s resemblance to another movie. There are no distinguishable utterances to its design or motivations that don’t feel remarkably performative.
Considering this is the build-up to the final act’s heist-to-chase centerpiece, the wait better be worth it. And for the most part, it is. Like the entirety of the movie, the heist is already being likened to another piece of work, and in this instance, the great French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville. Here is where Gudegast shines as a filmmaker. Like the predecessor, Gudegast has a knack for generating thrills around timing. In the WDC the Panthers play a tense game of “Red Light Green Light” with camera angles, elevator shafts, and stairwells. Gudegast’s camera consistently notes shuffling feet marching in lockstep as if they’ve done this before. The masked silhouettes of the Panthers are broadly shaped figures that glide across the floor with tactical agility and militaristic precision. These bodies, despite their BMI, are viewed as nimble practitioners of pitch-perfect execution. Oftentimes it feels airless to see people so good at their jobs never having a miscue, but the spectacle is the abilities they harness within. Which just so happens to be the most motivated portion of the movie.
With that being said, Gudegast misses his chance to surprise the audience through his characters. In their relatively mistake-free heist, Gudegast is primed to exemplify a characteristic trait that defies our expectation of who we thought these people were. Or what they believe in. Forgive me for going back to Heat, but where Michael Mann is clever, and Gudegast isn’t, is in positioning his characters to make choices that contradict what they believe in. This is probably why many rudely claim Den of Thieves as ‘dumb guy Heat’ (which is just too grating a statement), but it’s not that DoT and Pantera are ‘dumb’, they just have nothing worth believing in.
Think of Neil’s choice to track down Waingro despite getting exactly what he was looking for by the end of Heat. This choice leads to his demise because of who he is as a character. He can’t stop. The story foreshadows this early on, but the movie repeatedly convinces us he may not indulge in that choice if he were to face it. The surprise is that he is exactly who he was presented to us as. In comparison, I couldn’t manufacture an idea to even lightly define a motivating force behind Donnie or Big Nick. The story simply gives them free reign to exist without an internal structure in the sandbox. Which doesn’t sound so bad when they’re fun to hang out with, but 2.5 hours of rationalizing a reason to be here without a vested interest to hang onto is markedly worthless. Especially within the scope of five hours of story that seems to believe the inspirational stratosphere can’t be reached.
This new wave of American action at the cinema uproots the canon as an influential force ripe for reinterpretation. Yet they rarely appear to understand what makes those movies function on their own terms in the wider scope of their place in film history. Den of Thieves/Pantera may be like Heat, like Ronin, like Jean-Pierre Melville, or even Jules Dassin’s brilliant Rififi, but the most exemplary traits about DoT solely exist within the framework of works we already love. Unlike the symphonic graces that orchestrate an amalgamation of action cinema that you’d find in John Wick 4, Pantera doesn’t really make room for using its inspiration to inform an individually satisfying theatrical experience as JW4 does. We can leave a film like that and note its inspirations without needing to apply crutches to keep it upright because we can see how it has been designed to exist within the pantheon as a continuation without diminishing the value of the works that got us to this point. That’s not to say Pantera is inconsiderate of the masters that blazed the trails, but there seems to be no considerations of hearty narrative progression to earn the taut thrills we end up likening to something else. If that isn’t derivative, I’m not quite sure what is.
Den of Thieves was hardly a milestone in action cinema, but it at least carried us through a story with a few points of worthwhile interest. Now, with a sequel and set-up for a third entry, we’re entering a world where Big Nick could be in a big franchise if the money trickles in throughout a light January slate. You just have to wonder if audiences are willing to accept the lowest-brow interpretation of great movies we’ve been talking about for years, or if the reasons for franchising this thing are solely predicated on social media attempting to manufacture it into something more.
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