REVIEW: 'Den of Thieves 2: Pantera'

It’s a bold move by writer director Christian Gudegast to follow up his hit 2018 action thriller Den of Thieves with a sequel that is lacking in both action and thrills.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is a bizarrely muted, meandering follow up to one of the best Heat-inspired crime dramas of the lot, a dynamic action movie with multiple heists, chases, shootouts, and wide array of actors bouncing off one another, filling the screen with energy and testosterone and all the macho posturing you want from a movie of this ilk. The kinetic force of the first movie is what makes this sequel, where there is (arguably) one extended action set piece that occupies 20 minutes of a 140-minute movie, more confounding.

Aside from a few early scenes, the only returning characters are, of course, Gerard Butler as human bulldog “Big Nick” O’Brien, and O’Shea Jackson Jr. as the master thief, Donnie, who made a clean getaway in the original. We pick up with Donnie in Europe, where he and his new crew boost diamonds from a shipping yard in Belgium. Meanwhile, O’Brien is stumbling through the wreckage of his life, an outcast on the force, finally divorced, sleeping in his truck. If nothing else, Butler is worth watching. He’s so good in this role, and good in more roles than he gets credit for, but the problem is there’s nobody here to match his energy.

Nick sees the Belgium heist on the news and begins to snoop around, and before long he is headed to Nice, France to surprise Donnie ahead of taking down his latest target, a vault in the most heavily secured diamond district in the world. He surprises Donnie in more ways than one, and the rest of the movie decides not to surprise us at all.

As you can probably tell by the trailers, Nick and Donnie bond in France and are working together, at least in some capacity, to pull off this latest caper. The central focus of Butler and Jackson would be more than enough juice at the core of the movie, had anything around them been remotely interesting.

Aside from the opening theft, which is over and done with no real tension, Den of Thieves 2 spends a staggering amount of time with characters sitting and talking about doing things. As the time crept forward, thirty minutes, an hour, ninety minutes, characters still basically sat in rooms or in clubs or on boats or in cars, and they talked in somber tones. Only the conversation was not engaging, not character development, not plot details, not really anything.

There is a scene where Donnie and Nick party it up with their new gang of robbers - none of which leave any mark on the movie - but this party scene isn’t enough to justify the endless slog surrounding it. The script is really a conundrum; once the central heist happens, there are too many details left unexplained in the execution of their plan, and too much happening that is unclear. Part of that is because none of the supporting characters are memorable in the least, part of it is because all that dialogue and conversation going on and on endlessly in the first two acts of the film didn’t even complete the basic task of including important exposition that would set up the tension for the heist. Ninety minutes of build up, mostly wasted.

The ultimate car chase and shootout is great, exciting, a remnant of the first film, but it’s over and done with. The bad guys are dispatched by these other bad guys (don’t get me started), and we are on our way to the obvious finale. It’s another flat moment devoid of tension when all is said and done.

It may seem as if I am criticizing Gudegast and his film because it was not what I wanted. But, I would argue, I simply wanted this sequel to match the undeniable energy of the first film. I didn’t want it to be the same movie, just a new and exciting one showcasing these actors and showing off Gudegast’s technical craftsmanship. If the intention was to push this into more dramatic territory, focusing on the relationship between Nick and Donnie, that is perfectly fine. But if that’s the intention, the pages and pages of conversation and setup and glares and walking and looking at things in the script has to have some sort of propulsive energy behind them.

This is a baffling movie.