Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

★ | Den of Thieves 2: Audience 0

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is a film so bloated and off-putting you'd think it was tailor-made for Steven Seagal. It's a sub-sub-genre of Eurotrash known to fans as Scumbag Cinema. A celebration of everything grimy and tacky. On that front, it's a success. Pantera is like watching a group of wealthy Europeans past their prime descend upon paradise like drunken locusts.

Pantera is a direct follow-up to Den of Thieves, a lowbrow heist film from 2018 that barely left an impression, yet the filmmakers treat it like it was a beloved classic that everyone knows by heart. This results in cameos and callbacks that will mean very little to even those who saw the original. The camaraderie between Nick (Gerald Butler) and Donnie (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) is handled as if they were Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat. We're expected to root for their bromance, but there's so little meat around this haphazard plot that it comes off like they're playing for a romantic comedy in a serious heist film.

The messy script aims for that same Michael Mann -style and instead comes across as a teenager's idea of everything cool. Where Heat echoed with melancholy and the deep loneliness of this lifestyle, Pantera is drenched with gaudy jewelry, superficial night clubs, and drunken middle-aged men howling "fuck NATO!" into the night.

At nearly two and a half hours in length, Pantera spends ages in these dreadful moments, desperately attempting to make us care about its paper-thin characters. We hit every cliche imaginable: the meet-cute alpha bro posturing, gangsters choosing different music off the radio, and the inexplicable attraction from the only woman in the crew towards Gerald Butler, who looks like he's cosplaying Mel Gibson. You can guess where the film goes within fifteen minutes, and it never attempts to dispel that notion. This is the kind of filmmaking that defines the term bog-standard.

If Pantera had even an inkling of self-awareness or humor about itself, it could easily turn into a fun romp that knowingly winks at its ludicrous nature. Instead, it doubles down on the desperate attempts to appear tough and masculine, even as both male leads struggle to not wheeze as they get out of the sports cars they've crammed into.

The final act, all forty minutes of it, is dedicated to the actual heist, and it's a dreary, convoluted mess. It tips its cap at Rififi more than once, yet never even comes within the same ballpark or country in terms of quality. It mistakes slow pacing for realism and incomprehensible prattle for professionalism. Some moments, like the part where Jackson and Butler have to scale a thin pipe across two rooftops, feel almost like self-parody, considering the stunt and fitness of the cast.

By the end, Pantera settles into a long-winded exposition dump where it sets up future films. I guess someone wants them, but I don't know who.

Perhaps they'll learn from this, and the franchise turns into an over-the-top budget version of The Fast and the Furious. In that world, this kind of posturing and inelegant stupidity would work. But there's something deeply sad about watching such a lack of self-awareness. Everyone involved is better than this, especially the audience.