If 2018’s underrated “Den of Thieves” was almost-too-obviously inspired by Michael Mann’s “Heat,” the long-awaited sequel sees writer/director Christian Gudegast pivoting to another Robert De Niro-led action classic John Frankenheimer’s car chase classic “Ronin.” When a character had the codename Ronin early in the film, I allowed the consideration that it might be a coincidence, but then “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” makes its debt to European-set stories of international criminals apparent for the next two hours-plus, including sharing a setting with the Frankenheimer classic in the gorgeous city of Nice, France. Both filmmakers also thrive off attention to detail, Gudegast eschewing the option to “Fast and Furious” this franchise and go bigger and louder with the sequel. Instead, he has delivered what could be called a heist procedural, a film granular with details about one massive criminal undertaking, elevated by a pair of charismatic leading men in one of the most beautiful places in the world.
Nick O’Brien (Gerard Butler, in the part he was born to play) is still licking his wounds over the robbery of the Federal Reserve from the first film, even though his superiors have insisted that he close the case. After all, nothing was stolen. (If you’ve forgotten a 7-year-old film, the original was about a group of bank robbers stealing the “unfit” money that’s been taken out of the system by the Fed before it’s destroyed.) Nick knows that Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) was the real mastermind of that job, and it eats at Nick that he got away with it. When bank accounts connect Donnie to a recent diamond heist out of Antwerp, Nick heads to Europe to find his man.
However, “Den of Thieves 2” is not the typical cat-and-mouse promised by its set-up. It turns out that Nick doesn’t want to catch Donnie as much as join his side of the cops-and-criminals ledger. So when he basically stumbles into Donnie’s latest job, masterminding the heist of the World Diamond Authority, he becomes a key player on his team. Almost too key a player. I never quite bought how easily Nick slipped into this world or how easily Donnie let him. And while Donnie is shown planning a lot of the elaborate crime, it does feel like Jackson takes a back seat to Butler more than he needed to once the job actually gets its feet on the ground.
By the way, it’s important to note how long it is before that happens. “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” is more about planning a job than it is the job itself. It is downright obsessive in its detail about camera cycles, false identities, and elaborate planning. And Gudegast loves to place potential traps around Donnie and Nick, including former members of this crew who might now want revenge and even the Italian mafia who want Donnie’s head for the Antwerp diamond heist. While there is a nice simmering tension, the trailers that show just about every action moment in the film are downright misleading, and Gudegast once again reminds us that he is practically reckless when it comes to running time, making a relatively subdued genre film (by American blockbuster standards) that runs over 140 minutes.
And yet I rarely felt the length. Once Nick and Donnie really bond in a great scene of drunken shawarma eating, the movie hums to its excellent final set piece, a phenomenal chase/shoot-out sequence in the French hillside that once again makes the classic action influence clear in that the bullets have a punch and the vehicular mayhem feels realistically metallic instead of that CGI cartoon nature that we so often see in films like this one.
I’ll admit that I did kind of miss the Los Angeles hum of the first film, and the stronger supporting cast of that endeavor (but I also like “Heat” more than “Ronin,” so it makes a bit of sense I suppose). No one is bad here—in fact, Evin Ahmad as a possible love interest for Nick is quite good—but Gudegast relies heavily on the stellar buddy movie chemistry of his two stars, who step back into these roles like no time has passed since they played them. It probably won’t take another seven years to make a third “Den of Thieves” film (that I’d like to be subtitled “Megadeth” please), and I’m here for it, almost wondering what action classic that film will pull from in its construction. Someone send Gudegast a copy of “To Live and Die in L.A.” for me.
