Film: Den of Thieves 2: Pantera Cast: Gerard Butler, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Meadow Williams, Jordan Bridges, Evin Ahmad, Swen Temmel Director: Christian Gudegast Rating: 2.5/5 Runtime: 144 min ‘Den of Thieves’ was a humdinger of a heist thriller but this Part 2, a sequel to the 2018 cult film from Christian Gudegast, though fairly entertaining tries too hard to be smart and twisty.
The original was about a group of bank robbers stealing “unfit” money that’s been taken out of the system by the Fed before it’s destroyed. The climax of Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, in which two sports cars race through the winding hillside outside Nice, France, trading automatic weapons fire at each other, is in fact the most entertaining this movie gets. The rest is all about striving to come up with goods that could top the entertainment value of the first film.
This is not a movie about one long unrelenting car chase though, but it does have some crusty moments brought about by a good balance of violence, tension, and momentum. This is a heist thriller. The former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy, Big Nick ( ), knows that Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.
) was the real mastermind of the job, and it eats at Nick that he got away with it. When bank accounts connect Donnie to a recent diamond heist out of Antwerp, Nick heads to Europe to find his man. Donnie (the guy who got away in the first film), who is now embroiled in the treacherous world of diamond thievery and the infamous.
