When I finally watched Den of Thieves at the tail end of 2020, I remember feeling like I was finally about to fill in an embarrassing, nearly three-year blind spot. Heist movies are a top-five subgenre, and they’re hard to get right; the ravings that Gerard Butler had cracked the code in the latest installment of his impressive run of Hungry Man dinner action B-movies made this one sound like a layup. And yet, even with my expectations properly calibrated and contextualized, I ended the film with a shrug. (I looked up my Letterboxd review on the occasion of writing this column: “Like an 11th grader watched Heat and immediately downloaded Final Draft”—three stars.)
I know it’s supposed to be loud, and dumb, and cliche, but winkingly so—but the tenor among my writer peers (and other people whose taste I generally tend to find agreeable) was that it leaned into the loud dumb cliché of at all with such panache that it almost became subversive. It didn’t have that effect on me: great heist, Peak Gerry, cool shootouts and not much more. As a self-proclaimed smart person, maybe I didn’t need Heat that dumbed down. (Is Heat even that highbrow? It has one of cinema’s all-time great heists, all-time great shootouts, and Pacino in full ham mode screaming about big asses—when people make this analogy, you’d think they were talking about an Oscar-bait treatise that skimps on action and requires a lot of patience.)
I say all that to say: I went into the long-awaited Den of Thieves sequel, Pantera, with as much anticipation, because it could finally be free of the baggage that comes with that comparison. (I haven’t actually opened my copy of Meg Gardiner and Michael Mann’s novel-as-movie-pitch Heat 2—for all I know, it actually does involve Pacino following Val Kilmer to Europe to join him in a diamond heist.) In the seven years since the original, Den has, deservedly or not, become a full-on cult movie. A new adventure from writer-director Christian Gudegast, with Butler returning as scuzzy sheriff Big Nick alongside O’Shea Jackson Jr. (as Donnie, the unassuming master thief who outwitted him in the first film), all aiming to live-up to the appeal of the first and use that goodwill to get even nuttier? Man, that sounded like a layup. It sounded like the perfect January movie to ever exist, perhaps. And the early word-of-mouth supported that, with talk of “Gerard unleashed” and an all-time fantastic “heist sequence.”
Well, guys, I’m once again on the outside feeling lost, because Pantera is even more mid than the first, a largely dull and lifeless movie devoid of characters or plot interesting enough to validate its—gasp—144-minute runtime. The first rule of Heat for Bros should be that it shouldn’t be nearly as long as Heat. (Speaking of De Niro, this actually just made me want to rewatch Ronin, a guns-blazing heist movie also set in Paris with a nonsensical plot but immaculate who-cares vibes.)
