Den of Thieves 2: Pantera review – heist sequel has blood, sweat and De Beers

Seven years feels like a long gap between a movie and its sequel. But it seems appropriate for Den of Thieves 2: Pantera to take the slow road. The original heist thriller was only a medium-sized hit in cinemas, scoring around $80 million (£61m) at the global box office in 2018. It found its enduring fanbase on streaming and Blu-ray in the years after release, joining Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and Ben Affleck’s The Town (2008) in the blokey canon of endlessly rewatchable cops-and-robbers catnip, their imposingly long running times becoming macho Bubble Bath to luxuriate within.

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Back in 2018 writer and director Christian Gudegast took some critical knocks for studying the Heat blueprint perhaps a little too closely, pitting a hard-charging cop (Gerard Butler) against a ruthlessly competent bank robber (Pablo Schrieber) in the industrial sprawl of Los Angeles. But successful heists often involve a little misdirection, and Gudegast added a late-stage twist that recast the preceding action in a whole new light. You assumed you were watching a pretty decent Heat cover version; turns out there was a wicked sprinkling of The Usual Suspects in there too.

Gudegast is back in the big chair for Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera but it feels like such a fresh start you could almost come to it cold. (That thrash metal-sounding subtitle is actually inspired by the real-life “Pink Panthers” organised crime network of European jewel thieves.) All you really need to know is that last time round seemingly small-fry thief Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr) got one over on belligerent, big-bearded sheriff ‘Big Nick’ O’Brien (Butler). Donnie seems to have got away clean by abandoning LA for the Eurozone. But a slickly executed robbery at Antwerp airport is enough to get Big Nick’s antenna twitching.

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Donnie’s cargo-plane stick-up nets him some impressive gems, but it is just the precursor to a bigger score; he and his new Pantera-affiliated crew are sizing up a seemingly impregnable diamond exchange in Nice. That’s when Big Nick catches up with him, albeit with an unexpected offer. Rather than arresting Donnie, the burly cop wants a piece of the action. “I’m broke and I’m sick of being a hunter,” growls Butler. “It’s exhausting.” So the frenemies team up for a heist that could be worth €850m (£740m).

One of the disreputable joys of the first film was seeing Butler devour the scenery as a sweaty, swaggering thug who just happened to have a sheriff’s badge. He retains that Big Nick energy for the sequel, rubbing everyone up the wrong way and having great fun mispronouncing “croissant”. That might not seem to be the right temperament for a break-in that requires cool heads and precision timing but Big Nick thrives in his new vocation, particularly when flirting with glam ringleader ‘Cleopatra’ (Evin Ahmad).

If Heat was the inspiration for the original, Gudegast now seems to have taken some cues from The Italian Job (1969). The robbery takes place under cover of a football match that distracts the entire city while the getaway plan involves an Alpine escape in a nimble motor (in this case a whizzing electric Porsche Taycan rather than a cheeky Mini). But all the thoughtful planning, nightclub bonding and scrapes with local cops and disgruntled mafia would not add up to all that much if the central heist itself did not deliver.

Thankfully it is a brilliantly conceived and executed sequence, combining audaciousness (Donnie, Big Nick and their cohorts must conga through a sequence of surveillance dark zones with crackerjack timing) with arduousness (turns out it takes a lot of physical effort to ransack an enormous safe and ascend back up a lift shaft). This is not a slick, effortless Ocean’s 11-style operation with finger-snapping jazz on the soundtrack; Gudegast wants you to imagine the sweat stinging in your eyes as you try and haul yourself up to safety as the authorities close in.

It’s a shame that in the UK Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera is debuting on a streaming service: it has a gritty heft and sun-dappled visual sweep that feels like it was intended to be enjoyed at the cinema. But it also unashamedly takes care to prepare the ground for a potential third film. Perhaps Big Nick will return to the big screen again, although hopefully it won’t take seven years this time.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is on Prime Video now.

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