Contains spoilers for Den of Thieves and Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.
On Christmas Day last year, my roommate Kuzey texted me out of the blue. He said, and I quote, “u gotta see den of thieves.” With all due respect for the CD player my aunt got me, this text was the greatest gift of the season. I had actually already started watching Den of Thieves on my phone while on the Greyhound home to Cincinnati for the holidays, but remembered that the late David Lynch would have detested me watching a film on my “fucking telephone.” Also, I was nauseous. Coincidentally, this was not the only abortive Greyhound watch of Den of Thieves I experienced last year – on a trip from Columbus to Chicago, the driver threw on the Den of Thieves DVD menu only for the tiny TVs to inexplicably start playing The Italian Job (2003). I finally got around to it on the 29th, and it was the last movie I watched in 2024.
As a heist movie, Den of Thieves is clearly trying to ape Heat (1995) with its LA setting and ostensible commitment to tactical realism (the term “tacticool” gets thrown around a lot in reviews), but much of what makes it beloved in critical circles is the way it evokes the miserable, scuzzy aesthetics of suburban sprawl (filmmaker and critic George Matthews has coined the term “burgerpunk” to describe this aesthetic – and the list is seriously worth checking out). The characters that populate this world are laughably hypermasculine meatheads, a decision just as intentional and calibrated as the production design. A beautifully bloated Gerard Butler is the epitome of this archetype as the world’s most divorced detective, Nicholas “Big Nick” O’Brien. He is on the hunt for a group of bank robbers that includes ex-con and master thief Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.). It’s this thorough commitment to a specific environmental texture that makes Den of Thieves stick in my brain despite its more derivative elements, and I was terribly curious to see what director Christian Gudegast would do with the sequel.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (or as Kuzey and I have taken to calling it, Peaktera) trades its original’s sleazy toxicity for a more exuberant, glitzy milieu as the series moves to the coastal city of Nice, France. Donnie, having made a Keyser Söze-esque escape at the end of Den of Peaks, has linked up with an international heist crew known as The Panthers. The movie opens with them stealing a red diamond, property of the Italian mafia, in Antwerp, before they all reunite in Nice, where they prepare to rob the World Diamond Center. Meanwhile, dirtbag detective Big Nick is still in L.A., fresh out of family court – probably the only reason he would ever wear a suit. The aesthetic shift of the film is actually reflected in Nick’s wardrobe throughout, as we see him in leisurely yet refined suits and shirts rather than the utilitarian, sports-fabric tanks and tees of the first movie.
Nick, still hung up on pursuing Donnie, heads to France despite not having any legal jurisdiction. He tracks him down, and with steak and a gun on the table between them, lays out the way things are. Nick argues that the only reason the things Donnie and his crew steal have any value is because people like Nick try to stop them. “You’re not a killer, I am…You got one over on me. No one gets one over on me,” he tells Donnie. Nick is motivated by a masculine need to be better, to one-up, but also recognizes that he and Donnie make up, in his words, a “symbiosis,” where what each of them does is not possible without the efforts of the other. He finally, wearily, capitulates: “I’m sick of being a hunter. It’s fucking exhausting.”
And so it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Before commencing with the heist, Nick has to prove himself to the rest of the crew, and we get a delightful clubbing sequence where he, Donnie, and the rest of the crew get high on ecstasy. There’s a hilarious moment where Nick, feeling pressure from the others to do drugs because of his cop background, says “Fuck the police!” and O’Shea Jackson Jr. (who famously portrayed his own father, Ice Cube, in Straight Outta Compton) whips his head around as if to say “Hey, my dad wrote that!”
From there, Nick and Donnie have a bromantic adventure through the streets of Nice, complete with all the hallmarks of a Euro Summer (drunken shawarma). They begin to reminisce on their childhoods and how they came into their respective professions. For both men, it’s a matter of being the best, taking pride in a job well done. They’ve inserted themselves into these roles from an early age, have defined themselves through them. Peak of Thieves 2 is always in conversation with the first film, where the macho mean streak was its chief quality. Now that Nick has come over to the other side, he – and the film – is asking: “can a tiger change its stripes?”
What follows is the nitty-gritty of the planning and execution of the heist, which is worth the price of admission alone (I encourage our loyal readers to go see this in theaters to run up the box office numbers for Den of Peaks 2: Peaktera so we can get Den of Threeves). Director Gudegast makes the audience anticipate this climactic set piece – aside from the opening diamond theft, he’s been content to have the audience sit through lengthy dialogue and hangout scenes, setting things up slowly and letting everyone vibe. The heist sequence begs the same patience. It’s about half an hour of quiet, methodical coordination of movements throughout the World Diamond Center, with brief, whispered communication only when necessary. It’s masterful, and clearly crafted with total admiration for the genre – not at all what you’d expect from a January Gerard Butler release.
Inevitably, something bad has to happen, and the heist’s success is short-lived as the police come barging in. In the moment, it’s a truly demoralizing turn of events -–we’ve bought into Donnie and Nick’s relationship so wholly, only for Nick to pull the rug out from under and undo the success they barely had time to celebrate. For a minute I was worried that this “the good guys (read: police) always win” bootlicker ending was Gudegast caving to the Hollywood machine, but fortunately, I was just being too woke. After his betrayal, Nick visits Donnie in jail and admits that the bond they forged was real, but “a tiger can’t change his stripes.” He leaves Donnie with an opaque warning: sit on the left.
Donnie follows Nick’s advice and is free in time for another sequel. The movie ends with Nick getting a thank-you text from Donnie and smiling. Nick was telling the truth – he and Donnie’s friendship was genuine. That keeps me thinking about the aesthetic change from the first film to this one, moving from something suffocatingly gross and mean-spirited to something lighter, where there’s fun in the sun and room to breathe. The relationship at the center of the series has undergone a similar transformation by the end of the film. Nick and Donnie might still be on opposite sides, but they know each other more fully now, and it’s about more than getting the job done.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is playing in theaters NOW! It belongs in the pantheon of supposedly dumb, bro-y, yet well-crafted action movies that have more to them under the hood (we’re working on a genre name) like Guy Ritchie’s Wrath of Man (2021), Michael Bay’s Ambulance (2022), or really anything Scott Adkins has been in. If you miss it in theaters, Peak of Peaks 2: Pantera still carries some of the VOD vibes of its predecessor so it’ll be great home viewing too. Honestly, you should watch it in theaters and at home – it’s just that peak.
-Nick