Review: Den of Thieves 2: Pantera gives Gerard Butler a European vacation par excellence | Canada Voices

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

Written and directed by Christian Gudegast

Starring Gerard Butler, O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Evin Ahmad

Classification 14A; 120 minutes

Opens in theatres Friday

Critic’s Pick

Moviegoers have long been conditioned – by both studios and critics such as myself – to treat January as a hopeless write-off. After the spectacle of November’s Thanksgiving blockbusters and the deluge of December’s Oscar hopefuls, we’ve come to assume that the start of the new year marks the start of Hollywood’s dumpster dive. Time to throw out whatever trash has been stinking up the joint, for hope that a few easy bucks are made without anyone really noticing.

Yet, over the past few years, January has also been the unofficial month of cinema du Gerard Butler, that wildly entertaining subgenre of pulpy, knowingly implausible thrillers featuring everyone’s favourite Scottish brute breakin’ rules and bustin’ heads. The tradition unofficially began with 2018′s Den of Thieves, an ambitious and supremely scuzzy riff on Michael Mann’s Heat that delivered the best kind of hard-boiled ridiculousness. Directed by longtime Butler collaborator Christian Gudegast (who was brought in to rewrite the Butler vehicle London Has Fallen), the first Den of Thieves cast the leading man as L.A.’s sweatiest and most unethical cop, “Big Nick,” on the trail of roughneck crooks who, the film’s final moments reveal, were covertly led by a lowly bartender named Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.).

And now, in the cold and allegedly cruel days of January, 2025, Gudegast has miraculously brought the gang back together for Den of Thieves 2: Pantera – no mean feat of reassembly given the first movie killed almost all the characters off except for Big Nick and Donnie. But who needs such initial stars as Pablo Schreiber and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson when you’ve got all the big beefy boys you could possibly ask for in Butler and Jackson, who relocate to the Côte d’Azur for this trashy-but-taut exercise in turned tables and changed games.

Pulling a sort of Fast Five on Den of Thieves die hards, Gudegast’s new film finds Big Nick crossing the sides from cop to crook, teaming up with his one-time nemesis Donnie to pull off a heist inside a French diamond exchange. Having lost custody of his daughters and the badge to his job after the events of the first film, a magnificently bearded Big Nick is out of cash and out of patience – why not team up with Donnie to pull the score of a lifetime? And if Donnie refuses, well, hey, Big Nick can always call back his law-enforcement buddies over at Interpol to swoop in and make an arrest.

But all these machinations require Donnie, who has adopted the French alias of Jean-Jacque (complete with a not-so-consistent accent), to convince the members of his new impossibly beautiful European team (including a fixer played by Swedish actress Evin Ahmad) to let the ex-cop in on the plan, which results in bruises of both the ego and bodily variety. Meanwhile, Donnie also has to keep the Italian Mafia happy, after his crew lifted a multimillion-dollar stone belonging to a feared gangland boss.

Gudegast is well aware that nothing in Pantera is exactly new. Much of the movie plays like Heat’s European Vacation – a dash of John Frankenheimer’s Ronin here, some of Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah there, not to mention a heaping dose of Jules Dassin’s 1955 classic French caper Rififi and even more Mann in the form of the meticulous safe-cracking tension of 1981′s Thief. But Pantera mixes its many influences into a smooth spectacle so confident and patient in its assemblage that it instantly wins you over. Even if you’ve never watched a second of the first Den of Thieves, you’ll quickly glom onto the charming ugly Americanism of Big Nick, lost in France and loving every second of it, or the braggadocio of Donnie, who seems more at home among European crooks than he ever did among L.A.’s most wanted.

And whereas the first Den of Thieves was all industrial L.A. grit, Pantera transports Gudegast’s fascination with the visual landmarks of working-class America to the ancient history of European labour, the director finding countless shades of backwards beauty in the rusted shipping yards of France and rotting rural homes of Italy.

While the new film lacks the Keyser Söze-level twist of the first – it’s not exceptionally hard to see where things are going, even when a last-dash hillside car chase keeps you on your toes – the finale is exceptionally sweet, both in its semi-automatic action and its earned sentimentality. And, of course, Butler kills it as Big Nick. In the entire oeuvre of cinema du Gerard Butler, there has never been such a perfect marriage between actor and character, man and moniker. Big Nick might not understand a lick of French, but Butler is simply parfait.