'Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera' is a Dudes Rock Classic
The sequel to 'Den of Thieves,' or as I like to call it, 'The Heist to Italy' is a low-stakes action movie that's mostly about the joy of hanging out.
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I never saw the original Den Of Thieves, released back in 2018, despite fellow B-movie enthusiast Joey Devine always assuring me it was “Dumb Guy Heat.”
I figured the next best thing I could do to rectify that situation (besides just renting the thing) was to check out the sequel, Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera, released this week. I figured I wouldn’t have to catch up on that much lore, and that seems like one of the central appeals of a Den of Thieves movie.
If Den of Thieves is like Dumb Guy Heat, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is more like Dumb Guy Point Break, or Dumb Guy Fast & Furious. If The Fast and the Furious was Point Break with Cars, Den of Thieves 2 is something like The Fast and the Furious with Just Hanging Out. I was surpised, both by how few genuine action scenes there were in it, and by how little I missed them. If all movies referenced above “explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person” (as the Charlie Kaufman character describes it to his Dumb Guy brother in Adaptation), Den of Thieves 2 largely explores the possibilities of those two aspects of the same person just hanging out. Turns out, it’s nice.
Den of Thieves 2 turns out to not even really be that dumb (mildly disappointing, tbh) — certainly not dumber than Point Break or Fast/Furious, which are both wonderfully, gloriously dumb in different ways — more just low key. Den of Thieves 2 is more like Not Trying Too Hard Point Break. It’s kind of a low-stakes hangout, more “The Heist to Italy,” a lá Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip movies, where the draw is mostly the joy of watching two dudes banter with the added benefit of a picturesque European backdrop, than the expected action-film-by-numbers from a Eurotrash director released in January.
Gerard Butler, who belongs to the pantheon of great (or let’s say “enjoyable”) actors whose main skill is looking like they always have a moderate hangover*, plays Nicholas “Big Nick” O’Brien. Big Nick is a chain-smoking LA County Sheriff who we meet — where else — at a custody hearing for his one, or possibly multiple children. The movie never bothers telling us, choosing instead to focus on what a chiseled down old smoke bag Big Nick is, with a circle beard that gradually grows into a regular beard over the course of the movie and who manages to evoke Jameson reek in almost every frame. Nick goes from trying to clean himself up in the bathroom of family court to waking up in the cab of his F-150. It’s there he meets with one of his police friends, who has been following the money from a heist depicted in the previous movie.
The big takeaway is that the money seems to be in Nice, France, right next door to the International Diamond Exchange. Big Nick obviously wants to go there and try to catch the heist mastermind, Donnie (O’Shea Jackson, aka Ice Cube Jr.), during whatever big score Donnie is planning. But neither Nick’s boss nor the advising Fed wants Nick to go, because at this point, they say, all a bust would do is draw attention to a big pile of money the general public doesn’t know the Federal Reserve even lost in the first place. Nick, of course, goes anyway, using an expired US Marshalls badge he had from being deputized on a previous assignment. This is, at its heart, a movie about half-bright guys bullshitting their way past guys who don’t care that much, a perfect anti-hero’s journey for our times.
Donnie, meanwhile, after stealing a giant diamond from a plane in the first scene, is in Nice pretending to be a diamond dealer from Cote d’Ivoire to do reconnaissance on the diamond exchange for his new gang, The Panteras, a group of grumbling Serbians led by a hot babe, Jovanna (Kurdish-Swedish actress Evin Ahmad). Pantera’s heavies include burly Slavko (Salvatore Esposito, previously the Italian gorilla man from Fargo season 4), lanky Marko (the vaguely Djokovic-esque Dino Kelly), and greying Dragan (Orli Shuka), many of whom don’t entirely trust Donnie yet.
Nick just sort of shows up in Donnie’s room one night throwing back scotch and threatenening Donnie with a gun until Donnie agrees to cut him in on the heist. Nick says he’s tired of being a cop and alternately sort of leans on Donnie and tries to bro down with him, like a one-man good cop/bad cop routine. “Fuck,” Donnie says.
You can tell, though, that Donnie kind of likes Nick. He even seems to mostly buy Nick’s story about being tired of doing cop stuff. The guy does look pretty tired, after all.
Much of the rest of the movie consists of the two of them bonding. They reminisce about their favorite food joints in South LA, bond over hard scrabble childhoods, and generally seek solace with one another, being the only two SoCal dirtbags surrounded by gorgeous women and fancypants Eurotrash yacht people. “Hey, cool name!” Nick says when he meets Slavko. “You didn’t tell me she was a supermodel,” he says when he meets Jovanna. Butler’s Scottish accent periodically leaks out (usually when he’s saying words with double O sounds, like “good,” which rhyme with “brood” rather than “wood” when he says them), which only makes him more watchable. Being inexplicably vaguely Scottish somehow only adds to Butler’s overall lovable bull in a china shop effect. The eternal Drunk Uncle You Can’t Take Anywhere.