Worth: $11.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Gerard Butler, 50 Cent, Pablo Schreiber, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Evan Jones, Dawn Olivieri, Mo McRae, Max Holloway
Intro:
...a pretty forgettable example of the form.
In the red corner: a hardened crew of ex-military bank robbers led by former Marine Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber), who plan to pull off an impossible heist: the Los Angeles branch of the US Federal Reserve, one of the most heavily guarded places on Earth. In the blue corner: an elite unit of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, led by maverick cop Big Nick O’Brien (Gerard Butler), hell bent on stopping them. The criminals are disciplined professionals, the cops are a rough and brutal crew who don’t mind breaking the law – not to mention heads – to get results.
The directorial debut of A Man Apart and London Has Fallen screenwriter Christian Gudegast, Den of Thieves spends most of its time happily chugging away as a sub par version of Heat up until its denouement, where it suddenly switches gears and becomes a sub par version of The Usual Suspects with the sudden revelation of a wealth of character and plot information that we won’t go into here lest we trip the spoiler alarm. Up until that point, it’s a just about watchable, overly macho crime drama that cares more about masculine posturing than theme, logic, or character – if you can imagine David Ayer on autopilot, you’re on the right track.
There are things to enjoy here, chiefly Butler’s OTT turn as the tattooed, hard-drinking, stripper-banging O’Brien, an obvious and arguably odious caricature that an underdeveloped subplot about an impending divorce cannot humanise, but who nonetheless is pretty entertaining. O’Shea Jackson acquits himself well as Donnie, the robbery crew’s wheelman who is pressured into becoming an informant for Nick and his posse. Heck, even 50 Cent does okay as one of the robbers – there’s a scene where he and the crew put the fear into his daughter’s prom date that is hilarious up until the point you realise this team of professional criminals have just let themselves all be seen together by a witness that could testify against them.
That’s just one of numerous logical deficiencies in the script, which goes to great lengths to engineer its central heist scenario, and then does things like have the cops set off a raging gunfight in the middle of a traffic jam with no regard for civilian casualties because, hell, you gotta have a gunfight, right? And while there’s fun to be had seeing dudes blaze away at each other with machine guns, or watching the utterly unreconstructed Big Nick chew the scenery, Den of Thieves‘ utter failure to really grapple with the bigger themes it obviously wants to tackle ultimately scuppers the whole enterprise. If you’re feeling particularly forgiving and just need that tough guy urban action thriller itch scratched, maybe cue this one up. Otherwise, it’s a pretty forgettable example of the form.
Action thriller….yeah, maybe, only in the last 30 minutes as the heist gets into action. At 140 minutes this film is way too long with too much filler, it was painful sitting through this until we got to the last 30 minutes. Gerard Butler is now making a habit of being in forgettable movies. ‘Geostorm’ was a crock of shite, ‘Den of Thieves’ is nothing to get excited about either.