Den of Thieves 2: Pantera Review: A Heist Thriller That Would Make Jean-Pierre Melville Proud

Ah, what a relief after the year-end self-importance of The Brutalist and Nosferatu to have some good January pulp in our filmgoing lives again. Seven years in the making, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera finally brings us back into the world of weary, hard-drinking cop Big Nick (Gerard Butler) and aspirant master-thief Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.). A film that even its biggest fans gave the backhanded compliment of “douchebag Heat,” the original Den of Thieves strangely endured––if partly due to a mixture of ambition and sleaze, almost like the grizzled anti-heroes at its center. 

The previous film ended with a bloody, foiled Los Angeles heist leaving Nick on the trail of Donnie, who had fled to London after being revealed as something of a secret criminal mastermind. The sequel opens on an airplane-diamond heist in Antwerp, Donnie now part of a highly skilled, mostly Slavic team of thieves called The Panthers. As for Nick: we start with the camera hovering behind his head as he pisses in a urinal. A title card, humorously deployed, specifies he’s in family court. Being that the joys of the first film were seeing Butler humiliate himself time and again from impending divorce and personal hubris, the film continues to develop this character in appropriate fashion.

Donnie’s heist makes global headlines and Nick thinks he has a chance for personal redemption if he can catch the thief who eluded him the first time. However, when flown out to sunny Nice to assist French cops on the hunt for the Panthers (and also munch on a croissant while at it), Nick hesitates at the captured security footage of Donnie. It crosses his mind that joining forces with him on his next heist of the World Diamond Center might be more appealing for the broke, unregarded cop than another unrewarding pursuit of justice. And on top of all this is mafia don Matteo “The Octopus” Venzolasca (Adriano Chiaramida), who wants the rare diamond stolen from him in the film’s opening heist back at any cost. 

There is perhaps a lot of plot, and the film, like its predecessor, runs comfortably over two hours. For what’s essentially January trash, it’s maybe surprising to see a movie like this take on so much while also maintaining a straight face. But that’s a very heavy part of the appeal for both: taking themselves so seriously, but only within the confines of their material. It’s nice that writer-director Christian Gudegast, whose experience outside these films is mainly writing lowbrow action flicks, doesn’t feel the need to add any post-modernism or winking humor to his crime epic, even if most viewers won’t ever mistake Gerard Butler for Al Pacino. 

In good form here, Butler nor Jackson Jr. exactly resemble Glen Powell at this point in their lives, and it’s part and parcel of Pantera‘s throwback charms that they’re the kind of rough-hewn protagonists missing from movies these days. Smoking, eating, drinking, and drugging throughout, they’re great company that elevates the proceedings well above soulless genre exercise. Their supporting cast may not be as memorable as the tattooed, Iraq War-veteran heavies portrayed by Pablo Schreiber and 50 Cent in the original. That said, Gudegast maintains a more satisfying dramatic focus winnowing down his plot to two central characters. 

Even if Gudegast isn’t quite a bold formalist yet, the sequel has both more ambition and variation than the first entry. An extended centerpiece heist sequence is surprisingly confident filmmaking, chiefly in adding visual devices like masks and poles while playing much of the proceedings without music. It’s a mix of maximalism and sparseness that would likely make Jean-Pierre Melville proud. Let’s hope they go even further for the third outing.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is now in theaters.

Grade: B