Jonah Naplan   January 10, 2025

“Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” is an action movie devoid of action. Director Christian Gudegast takes his sequel to the underappreciated 2018 film in a surprising direction, far away from the mechanics that could have turned this franchise into something like “Fast and Furious.” Instead, the movie is a curiously slow, thoughtful examination of how a grand heist will be executed with select buddy-comedy beats thrown in the mix. It’s certainly not bad, but I left feeling underwhelmed rather than riveted. There’s a few excellent scenes, including the highly calculated heist itself and an exciting car chase that follows, but I wanted more of them instead of the negative space that occupies most of this film’s overlong 140-minute runtime.

The movie follows Los Angeles cop “Big Nick” O’Brien (Gerard Butler) who travels to Nice, France when it’s revealed that his adversary from the first movie, mastermind crime boss Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) is connected to a recent diamond heist in Antwerp and is now eyeing the World Diamond Center for his next operation. Instead of trying to stop him this time, Nick joins Donnie’s criminal team as they hatch a plan to break into this impenetrable facility and steal valuable items. Along the way, they’ll have run-ins with the Italian mafia and a few old crew members who want revenge, but “Pantera” won’t start dealing in the real adrenaline until the last half hour.

Gudegast seems to want to position this film as a cops-and-robbers buddy-comedy and set up Nick and Donnie like Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in the “Bad Boys” franchise. He goes about this with frustratingly little charm. A bizarre, drunken club scene forces a little bit of this energy, but it’s mostly lost in the rest of the runtime. Where his direction really shines is the expertly designed heist sequence that uses all the typical devices—some sort of invisibility shield, threats of the owner returning home, a ticking clock—to maximize the tension. It’s the best part of the entire movie, not only because it’s what everything has been leading up to but also because “Pantera” is a heist movie that finally understands the value of silence. There’s nothing loud or obnoxious about this sequence. It’s surprisingly intricate and thoughtful, things that most modern blockbusters don’t seem to know anything about.

Gerard Butler is playing to the exact same spectrum of tough-guy hijinks that he did in “Plane” and the “Has Fallen” franchise. There’s little nuance in the character he’s portraying here. In any given scene in “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” he’s one of three things: (1) in the midst of action, (2) fooling around in a “bro moment,” or (3) communicating major plot points and exposition in his gruff, dramatic tenor. It will work well for audience members who’ve come to the theater knowing exactly what they’re getting into, and it’s with little shame that I admit I’m one of them. It’s Butler doing Butler on a larger scale and the camera eats it all up. For those who appreciate his usual tricks, he brings charisma to a film that is otherwise charmless. The script, also by Gudegast, attempts to offer something of a little more substance by introducing a potential love interest for Nick in Jovanna (Evin Ahmad), but it never blooms into anything more than a passive idea.

Jackson finds less success in his charismatic endeavors. The actor’s unbreakable, stone-faced demeanor warps the movie into something less fun. Before he and Nick reunite in Nice, “Pantera” cuts back and forth between each of their separate pursuits, and all of Donnie’s scenes feel written by artificial intelligence, undercut by a reverberant score that’s played over and over again. Gudegast could have cut at least thirty minutes of these establishing scenes and jumped into the meat of the story far earlier. It’s a bold risk to make “Pantera” such a slow action movie like Brian De Palma’s first “Mission: Impossible” or the Ryan Gosling grindhouse classic “Drive,” but it could have been much cooler if these characters and this story were more interesting.

All that to say, it’s technically never a “boring” movie. There are enough fixings on display, between the camerawork, which is always a treat to look at (Nice is, after all, an aesthetic city), and the main attraction of Butler who’s game for all that Gudegast throws at him; the film’s greatest tragedy is that it’s not much. Inevitably, the final scenes, which, indeed, feel like 100 different endings to a film that could have rolled the credits at under two hours, sets up a third “Den of Thieves” with potentially greater stakes and more threatening bad guys. If Gudegast ends up pursuing that route, let’s hope he reads a book or two on concision before then.

Now playing in theaters.