Den of Thieves, 2018’s Dad Movie par excellence, came out of nowhere to capture the imaginations of brows high, low, and middle with equal appeal. Some saw its story of blurred lines between cop and robber as merely a grimier, grittier L.A. crime saga in the vein of Heat, anchored by an instantly iconic performance of burned-out machismo from a never better Gerard Butler; others saw a more fulsome action movie homage full of hyperspecificity of place, class and labor concerns, and moral grey area. Honestly, it’s probably all of those things, and ending on a tantalizing promise of more story left to tell only fueled the fires.
Now, after some delay, we have Den of Thieves: Pantera, which finds Butler’s vengeful, miserable cop Big Nick O’Brien hunting down turns-out-he’s-a-criminal-mastermind Donnie (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.), the one who got away last time, chasing him all the way to the French Riviera with a proposition: Nick wants in on Donnie’s latest heist, a brazen robbery of the World Diamond Exchange in Nice. It’s a beautiful setup for a more-is-better sequel, with an exotic location, a new set of adversaries, and an uneasy alliance between bitter rivals. This makes it all the more fascinating when the film takes a hard turn into a wistful near-bromance while Nick has a full-on existential crisis.
The middle hour of Pantera finds Nick — to whom we’re initially reintroduced while he is angrily failing to come to terms with his divorce and pending loss of his job and authority — falling in full-on love with his newfound criminal lifestyle. He’s awash in new emotion and possibility. Is it redemption he’s after or is this truly a new path for him? Butler is absolutely sublime here, like he’s sweating out the years of bad vibes that have poisoned his very soul in the face of becoming the thing he’s always thought he hated. Jackson, too, plays Donnie as pleasantly surprised to find himself making a real connection with his pursuer. These mid-movie passages have a dreamlike quality to them that’s punctuated — and sometimes punctured — by the occasional reminder that there’s a big job to pull, the eventual details of which are kept tantalizingly out of reach of the audience until the event itself occurs.
But even if Pantera is only incidentally about a heist, the film doesn’t pull any punches of satisfaction. Where the first film’s more action-heavy influences gave us a more ruthless, tactical violence of street shootouts and cover formations, and a robbery sequence that was all about watching the dominoes fall into place, this sequel offers viewers something of a Melville-esque job of work. Just as precise, yes, but carried out mostly silently, with a seamless visual exposition that truly coasts. It’s an outright blast to behold, and that it’s followed up with a gorgeous cliffside car chase/firefight that can’t help but remind of Frankenheimer’s ’90s (similarly Nice-set) masterpiece Ronin is just icing on the cake. But just like its predecessor, Pantera almost immediately transcends its influences and genre trappings to become something altogether more pleasurable, using a basic narrative spine to let its characters interrogate themselves while still giving us everything we expect from great trash. It’s a rare treat to come across a sequel this bold in design and accomplished in execution.
DIRECTOR: Christian Gudegast; CAST: Gerard Butler, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Evin Ahmad, Salvatore Esposito; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: January 10; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 24 min.
Published as part of January 2025 Review Roundup
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