This is how I I opened my review of “Den Of Thieves” seven years ago.
I like heist movies, and the more complicated the crime, the better. The heist at the center of “Den Of Thieves” certainly qualifies, but it gets bogged down in too much plot nonsense.
It wasn’t good enough to merit a sequel, but now comes “Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera.” Unfortunately, it isn’t much better than the original.
Gerard Butler returns as Los Angeles sheriff Nick O’Brien, still hunting for Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), who escaped after the Federal Reserve Bank heist in the first movie. O’Brien gets word that Wilson is planning to rob the world’s largest diamond exchange in Marseilles, France. When O’Brien finds Wilson, he convinces the thief he’s put his law enforcement career behind him and wants to join the criminal crew, which includes members of the Panther mafia. Wilson buys this and brings O’Brien onto the team.
Between then and the big heist sequence (more than an hour of screen time later), writer/director Christian Gudegast has once again bogged down his own movie with so much extraneous nonsense that what is supposed to be an action movie feels sluggish. “Den Of Thieves 2” also suffers from a cast of Europeans of various nationalities whose heavy accents make it difficult to understand the dialogue. As I sat in the movie theater watching, I wished I could turn on closed captioning like at home.
Butler (whose look now makes him indistinguishable from Russell Crowe) and Jackson are fine reprising their roles, but they can’t do much with the material Gudegast gave them. It includes too many highly unlikely coincidences, including one chase scene towards the end where characters appear at a place they could not possibly have known they should be to ambush other characters.
The last sentence I wrote in my review of the first movie applies equally to this sequel:
There’s a good movie somewhere inside “Den Of Thieves,” but it got lost in a sea of bilge.
I gave that one a 5 out of 10. But because everyone involved should have known better than to drag us through the same slog over more than two hours, I’m only giving this a 3. Opens tomorrow in theaters.