Director: Christian Gudegast
Cast: Gerard Butler, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Evin Ahmad, Salvatore Esposito, Meadow Williams, Swen Temmel
Rating: (M)
★★★
REVIEWED BY AMASIO JUTEL
In 2018, Christian Gudegast directed Den of Thieves, an action heist movie much in the vein of Michael Mann’s 1995 classic Heat melded with an energetic Ocean’s plot: an aggressively masculine retelling of the former combined with a sleazier version of the latter’s narrative.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (Neon) brings on new cinematic allusions, moving the plot from Los Angeles to an international stage, harnessing the Cuban/Miami-inspired aesthetic language of Mann’s later masterpiece, Miami Vice, with the neon lights and emphatic needle drops.
High-tech car heists in a buddy-cop tale — it’s hard not to draw another cinematic parallel to the Dwayne Johnson/Vin Diesel dynamic of the middle Fast and Furious movie, uncomplicating the "cops and criminals aren’t so dissimilar" subtext that has been hinted at since the earliest cop/crook action movies.
Not only are viewers starved of the sleaze that made the first movie so intoxicating, Pantera also removes the nuanced complexities that gave viewers so much space to read thematically into that instalment. There is a clear delineation between good and bad, and the thorny nature of Gerard Butler’s protagonist character, Big Nick, is made sympathetic.
In Den of Thieves, the entertaining nature of the heist makes the immoral redeemable, and Nick’s ability to "out-quip" his smarmy FBI counterpart furthers your layered emotional experience with him. What Pantera forgets is every character should be flawed, and the degree to which you support their actions is entirely dependent on the charisma of the actor portraying them.
This samey, blockbuster expansion of a promising franchise is no doubt fun but contains little to none of the thematic depth that made its originating film so great.
