Director Christian Gudegast’s juiced-up 2018 “Heat” homage “Den of Thieves” has become a bit of a cult hit in the years since it was released, due in large part to co-star Gerard Butler’s boisterously haggard performance as “Big Nick” O’Brien, a dirty Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detective (and gang member) on the tail of a well-connected master thief, Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber).
If “Den of Thieves” is a kind of “stupid heat,” then the rest, “Den of Thieves 2: Panther,” will pay homage to some other thriller through Robert De Niro, “Ronin,” with car prosecution on the hair pin tours in the hills of Nice, France, and a new team of skilled thieves led a charismatic woman, Jovanna (Evin Ahmad). Meanwhile, Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr. ), the promising young motive force from the first film who shot Big Nick and Merrimen, has now joined the Serbian mafia (aka Pantera) in the diamond robbery student. Cat burcares on the French Riviera? Sounds like “catching a den of thieves,” right?
In his loose remakes of the De Niro filmography, Gudegast by now knows the appeal is Big Nick, so he’s got to get our man — the ink still wet on his divorce papers — to France, hot on the heels of young Donnie. And so “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” becomes a travelogue for our antihero, an “A Propos de Nick,” if you will. While he munched and guzzled on donuts, fried chicken and glasses of wine through the first film, now he’s drinking espresso and enjoying “croy-sants” and gelato in Europe.
Nick presents himself in France under the appearance of identity of his suspect, after having followed Donnie’s bank account, but he falls too well with Donnie and Panther’s team, binding on them to borrow the vault of the World Diamond Centerry, Where a pink diamond giant who stole in a plane in Antwerp, Belgium, is in residence.
Nick is disturbed through his enemies of thieves, fascinated through them and has nothing more to lose. He is tired of hunting, he says. Then, instead of separating in a bull in Benihana with the former exordinate / former football star in the Los Angeles Plos Angelesge, Merrimen, is wasted in a French club with the affable Donnie (Passing for for Jean-Jacques, a rich broker diamond) and Scooter to download Shawarma. It is fun, but it is not exactly the same type of electrifying tension that encouraged the first film.
“Panther” is too clumsy, supported by the idiot of Nick’s personality. The first film reproduces directly, so it worked so well, and no one in “Panther” corresponds to Schreiber’s brilliant intensity and an anger over low heat, so it is more a comedy of friends between Donnie and Nick. The members of the Serbian gangs are not well established, and the Sicilian mafia, who also enter the ring, are not extensive as appropriate antagonists. In fact, everyone begins to combine in a mass of indistinguishable Euro-Mobilee, and there is no genuine feeling of danger.
Gudegast approached the script on his own (he co -written the first film with the showrunner of “Prison Break” Paul T. Scheing), and although he has a special skill for the robberies, the sequel does not boast of the tradition of his predecessor and is very Composed of and Deus Ex Machina to do things. 2 hours and 24 minutes, the film is flaccid, not modal and lacks an unpredictable live action element.
Although it is a laugh to connect with Big Nick and see it see new foods, anything is missing in this scam through the “Ronin” center, a danger. It turns out that Gudegast and his characters casting descended for Europe with only a few concepts in place, and the tapes check out of this global is not woven as much as the original. Ah, well, we will be bull.
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