Written by Tom Augustine.
This review contains spoilers for Den of Thieves (2018).
January has become known in the biz – notoriously – as a dumping ground, a place for scuzzy genre flicks and burnout actioners during a period where the big awards players have already been established, and blockbuster season is over. It’s a time, apparently, where cinephiles are encouraged to take a break, catch up on the Oscar-buzz movies, and generally ignore what’s coming out unless you’re looking for something high-calorie and low-effort. With the seismic shifts in the cinemascape over the last decade and a half, though, a certain affection has arisen in some circles towards the kinds of films released during this period – Liam Neeson action classics like Taken and The Grey, Michael Mann’s Blackhat, Jason Statham thumpers like The Beekeeper and Wrath of Man, chillers like M3GAN, Knock at the Cabin and Split, Gerard Butler vehicles like Plane. There’s a certain pulpiness to these titles that many will outright dismiss as cheapness – and, undeniably, there is a bargain-bin hue to many of these titles. Many are also, however, enormously enjoyable and deceptively well-made. Last year, David Ayer’s The Beekeeper remained in my head all year, landing on my Best of 2024 list. The Grey, Knock at the Cabin and Wrath of Man all popped up in years previous.
Had I seen it in 2018, Den of Thieves would very likely have been another. The debut feature of Christian Gudegast, the film is a winning blend of high-trash January brawn and Michael Mann-aping ambition, earning it accolades like critic Josh Lewis’ categorization that the film is ‘Heat by way of Monster Energy drink’. The debt Gudegast owes to Mann’s masterpiece is made very clear in the original film’s very structure, which pits a Pacino-like supercop against a DeNiro-like master thief. Only, in this version of the story, said master thief is a tatted Iraq War vet played by reliable character actor Pablo Schrieber, and the supercop is Big Nick, played by a never-ruddier Gerard Butler, a man seemingly built out of stale beer, cigs and gas station hot dogs.
The film, which also starred Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson and O’Shea Jackson Jr in a pivotal supporting role as an under-the-radar criminal mastermind, matched its lurid, grimy pulp pleasures with the refreshing sense that it took itself seriously; significant to this is the original’s bracing depiction of a police force completely without reins, a self-confessed cabal as vicious and amoral as the thieves they hunted. Gudegast, while not yet an action auteur of the highest calibre, demonstrated genuine ambition in the film’s execution, which he has again expanded upon with the long awaited sequel Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, which picks up where the original left off. The end of Den of Thieves saw Schrieber’s Ray Merrimen and his crew decimated after their attempted heist fell to pieces, only for sole survivor Donnie (Jackson Jr) to reveal himself as the brains of the operation and escape Big Nick’s clutches. Pantera relocates from the streets of LA to sun-drenched Europe, where Donnie continues to pull off successful heists, including lifting diamonds from a mobster’s private jet. The brazen theft immediately pricks up the ears of Big Nick, whose life has fallen apart since his failure to catch Donnie (hilariously, we first meet Big Nick at a urinal, at a family court proceeding, post-firing from the LAPD). Pursuing Donnie to Nice, then Antwerp, where he is planning his next heist – the heavily fortified World Diamond Center – Big Nick initially attempts to work with local authorities before a sudden change of heart. Broke, exhausted and demoralised, Big Nick wants a taste of life on the other side of the law, a line which never meant all that much to him anyway.
Six years in the making, the sequel to the Gerard Butler cult action spectacular expands upon the ambition of a film known affectionately by its fans as ‘dirtbag Heat’. Replacing grimy LA streetfights with slick Eurotrash intrigue, it is a film that mostly lives up to the gauntlet thrown down by its predecessor.
Where Den of Thieves was a tragic cops-and-robbers shoot-em-up, Pantera finds Gudegast drawing from a host of different influences to reform his sandbox into something closer to sleek Euro-centric thrillers, chiefly John Frankenheimer’s Ronin. Along the way, Butler and Jackson Jr’s interplay – initially antagonistic before arriving at something like genuine dependency – adds shades of a buddy cop comedy, layering in appreciable levity to Gudegast’s po-faced intensity. There is something lost in the transposing of this story outside of the grime, dirt and excess of the streets of Los Angeles – like the Fast and Furious franchise before it (another series to which this owes a clear debt), these characters work better the less globe-trotting they are, the down-and-dirty aesthetic of Big Nick’s whole deal clashing somewhat with the clinicism of the innumerable French and Eastern European factions he and Donnie encounter. Butler, who has never had a better role, is utterly magnetic here; his Big Nick is a fascinating, often repellent creation, an amoral, broken asshole – who notably begins the film by threatening a sex worker he’s frequented with death – and yet remains compulsively watchable, even likeable. He and Jackson Jr are appreciably rough-hewn, beefy and unvarnished. They don’t look like action heroes so much as schlubs who have stumbled upon a lucrative hustle. Jackson Jr, who greatly resembles his father Ice Cube, carries little of the same swagger or intimidatory presence – he’s a bit of a dork, who may also just happen to be a genius.
Gudegast takes big swings here. He’s largely dispensed of his sprawling American cast, and with it the micro-focussed attention to detail, favouring a sweepingly emotional, at-times laughably convoluted approach. This threatens to collapse in the first hour of the film, which is weighed down by extensive introductions to mostly interchangeable Eastern European heavies. Virtually none of the European cast register at all, save for Swedish actress Evin Ahmad as Donnie’s sly handler Jovanna. The internal logic of the film flies out the window early on – why, for example, would Donnie so quickly and so easily trust Big Nick’s intentions as a turncoat? – devolving into an incoherent morass of barely established rival gangs, including the Panthers, who Donnie now works for. It’s nigh-on impossible to follow who is in league with who, or why. Better to sit back and wait for the inevitable (if longer-awaited than necessary) fireworks. When they do come, they are richly satisfying. The big centrepiece of Pantera is an exceptional, heartstopping heist sequence, in which our antiheroes must attempt to circumnavigate a range of security measures in order to get their hands on a giant red diamond, among other riches. It’s a fantastic payoff for all the lengthy table-setting – the thieves are not impervious tech-geniuses, relying instead on their wits, speed and a very useful, hook-like length of steel to traverse the rooftops around the vault. Gudegast’s confident direction, which evokes the great heist movie Rififi in its steady building of tension in near-silence, is a showcase for a young director throwing their all at the screen and pulling it off.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera seems most interested in the lure and pull of the criminal lifestyle, the intoxicating rush of being the bad guy. Bick Nick has been a bad guy for a long time, in all but name, and Butler expertly conveys the rush of finally accepting what everyone around him has known for years. It’s telling that Nick’s family is mentioned often, but doesn’t figure at all into the story – Nick luxuriates in selfishness, framing the film’s final, inevitable twists as something of a grand moral test that Nick will eventually fail. And yet, such a failure is also a liberation. As a hilariously grand M83 track swells and we swoop out over the Cote d’Azur landscape, Nick’s embracing of oblivion feels earned and thrilling, not least because of the clear, open door Pantera leaves to countless, ever-nastier future sequels. As long as Gudegast continues to embrace the chameleonic, subgenre-shifting ambition he’s already established with this series, I’ll be eagerly seated for part three – and part four, five, six, seven and beyond.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is in cinemas now.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

Movie title: Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (dir. Christian Gudegast)
Movie description: Six years in the making, the sequel to the Gerard Butler cult action spectacular expands upon the ambition of a film known affectionately by its fans as ‘dirtbag Heat’. Replacing grimy LA streetfights with slick Eurotrash intrigue, it is a film that mostly lives up to the gauntlet thrown down by its predecessor.
Date published: January 9, 2025
Country: United States
Author: Christian Gudegast
Director(s): Christian Gudegast
Actor(s): Gerard Butler, O'Shea Jackson Jr, Evin Ahmad
Genre: action, Drama, Crime
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Movie Rating