As a movie star, Gerard Butler owns January like Will Smith owns Memorial Day and the Meg movies own August. That Butler’s B-grade thrillers now dominate frozen oblivion at the box office in the first weeks of the year may seem like a Pyrrhic victory, but at least he’s king. Something. And Butler’s gruff, beady-eyed, scowling charisma has aged well. A fast-moving actor in a caveman’s body, he has the ability to levitate a piece of pulp so that it looks almost like a real movie.
For most of its 2-hour-24-minute running time, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, the sequel to Butler’s cops-versus-con heist from 2018, offers a satisfying imitation of a high-end crime film. If you want to know what makes Butler such a high achiever, look no further than the way he smokes on camera, dragging on a cigarette as if he’s sucking the tobacco into his soul. In “Den of Thieves 2,” Butler returns as “Big Nick” O’Brien, a Los Angeles cop on a tense high end. There’s a new team of thieves – Balkan thugs with complex accents – and O’Shea Jackson Jr. reappears as Donnie Wilson, who was revealed at the end of “Den of Thieves” to be the hero of this film. Mastermind of the underworld.
After successfully robbing the Federal Reserve by stealing a mountain of banknotes that are about to be shredded (so no one will know they’re missing), Donnie flees to Antwerp, where he now connects with Jovanna (Evin Ahmed), who leads a team of thieves known as the Panthers . (Pantera is the code name for the police task force working to stop them.) The film opens with the Panthers, disguised in SWAT gear, lifting a cache of diamonds from a jet plane arriving from South Africa.
But those diamonds will be just bait. In Nice, Donnie and Giovanna, posing as wealthy jewelers, launch a plan to fence off the stolen gems at the World Diamond Centre, a public fortress – somewhat like a Swiss gem bank – that is guarded like a castle, with a battalion. Security guard and 137 surveillance cameras. Once they’re set up there, they launch their real plan: to break into the inner vault of the World Diamond Center.
This is an “ocean” level mission. And Donnie, played by Jackson with his savvy world experience, will have a partner he didn’t expect. He’s Nick, who has tracked Donnie down and wants to join the gang, which he does by presenting the life of a recently divorced, struggling cop as a renegade sob story. In fact, Nick wants to get revenge on Donnie by trapping him. But the plot of “Den of Thieves 2” is a con within a con, with Nick and Donnie being both rivals and friends. How could we not want to see them succeed?
Nick, brandishing an International Marshal’s badge (it’s expired, but who cares?), forms a hidden alliance with the Belgian police chief, Hugo (Yassin Zatz-Ator), allowing him to wander into an Antwerp police station distorting the pronunciation of “croissant” and generally pushing into his rebellious rudeness. Ugly American. He does the same thing when sneaking up on thieves, and it’s thrilling to see Butler taking the piss out of these European thugs or getting blasted with hashish on the dance floor.
Writer-director Christian Gudegast directed the first “Den of Thieves” as a solid imitation of a Michael Mann film (it was more like an over-the-top “Heat”), at least until the film succumbed to more preposterous plotting. “Den of Thieves 2” is a more streamlined and smoother film, a story that pans around European cities and pauses for a subplot about Sardinian gangsters who lose a giant pink rock in a plane robbery. They dropped Nick and Donnie into the ocean as a threat of what would happen if they didn’t get him back.
The heist itself is daring, fun, and impossible to believe (which, for me, somewhat detracts from the fun). The Panthers know that most security camera images are not visible on the guards’ screen at any given moment; They hack the network to see which shots are visible and when. But the idea that they could coordinate all of this somehow Where are they? In the castle at any moment – corridors, elevator shaft, basement – it makes no sense. When watching “Den of Thieves 2,” you don’t so much suspend your disbelief as put a sedative on it for about 25 minutes.
Yet Gudegast, for all his casual treatment of plausibility, is a spirited filmmaker. He maintains the buzz of mano-a-mano confrontations, and has a sixth sense for how to present Butler as a charmingly disheveled schlock version of Dirty Harry-meets-Popeye Doyle-meets-“Lethal Weapon”-gone alone. Butler has been a star for 20 years now, during which time he’s battled a host of political terrorists (in the “…He’s Down” films) and faced forces as disparate as environmental disaster (“Greenland”) and Russian kidnappers. (“Hunter Killer”) and anti-colonial rebels (“Airplane”). But the “Den of Thieves” films may be Butler’s strongest film series. It’s something old and also new: stealing movies with a death wish.