Gerard Butler is one of those actors who exists in a category all of his own: a subgenre unto himself. 2018’s Den Of Thieves was among the better of Butler’s prolific recent output, the film that introduced the world to the classically Butlerian role of ‘Big Nick’ O’Brien: a grizzled detective in the Los Angeles Major Crimes Unit with a shit-eating grin, a disastrous home life, a chain-smoking cigarette habit, and a distaste for playing things by the book.
The first film established a kind of trashy, brashy take on Michael Mann’s Heat: a two-sides-of-the-same-coin cops-and-robbers relationship between Butler’s Big Nick and Pablo Schreiber's bank robber Ray Merrimen. That frenemy dynamic returns, this time between Big Nick and O’Shea Jackson Jr's heist mastermind Donnie.
Look, nobody’s saying they’re De Niro and Pacino, but the dynamic between Big Nick and Donnie gets more interesting in this sequel, acknowledging and exploring further the “weird symbiosis”, as Nick puts it, which the two seem to share. It begins with a blistering pace, establishing the heist that kicks it all off: a daring diamond robbery at Antwerp airport. (Returning writer-director Christian Gudegast took inspiration for some plot points from a real-life heist which took place in Antwerp in 2003.)
When the heist finally arrives, it’s suspenseful and sharply staged.
This attracts the attention of Big Nick. Still juggling his mess of a personal life — when we first meet him, he’s taking out his rage on hand dryers — he decides that enough is enough. He’s going to break bad. Before we know it, these former adversaries become unlikely allies, making moves to steal a huge take from the World Diamond Center in Nice, France.
After that opening rush, the film takes its time and, as with the original Den, needlessly sails past the two-hour runtime mark. A tighter edit would have been welcome. But you have to admire a Gerard Butler film which emphasises character over carnage. It’s certainly no chore to watch Big Nick and Donnie engage in manly bonding, drunkenly ride scooters, chant “Fuck NATO” at a Mob party, and debate the correct pronunciation of “croissant”.
Gudegast matches his characters for meticulousness, too, carefully plotting every detail with perhaps some excessive set-up. It’s well over an hour until the heist proper begins — but when it finally arrives, it’s suspenseful and sharply staged. The film benefits from strong stunt choreography and location shooting, too, the crew criss-crossing from Belgium to Italy to France, from the croisettes of the Côte d’Azur to the vertiginous hairpin roads of the Alps. In an era of genre movies that feel green-screened to within an inch of their lives, that in itself is a glass of water in a desert.
And while a lot of this feels achingly derivative, borrowing liberally from heist films like Ocean’s Eleven, Heat or, yes, the original Den Of Thieves, it finds a way through its weaker moments via the ever-winning chaotic charisma of Gerard Butler, a lead actor as reliable and witty and gruffly charming as ever. Another solid entry to a one-man canon.
