With Den of Thieves, we don't really have a good heist film, but it isn't bad either. This is one of those movies that occupy the middle ground, where it just sort of exists and nothing is very memorable. There is something to say about the well shot action sequences, but what we get outside of those moments is far from compelling.
The film focuses around a group of skilled bank robbers and their big plan to rob the Federal Reserve in Los Angeles. Leading the group is Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber), a former special forces bad ass that assembled a solid team. Standing in their way is a group of detectives led by Nick O'Brien (Gerard Butler), a rough and tumble cop who plays by his own rules. Essentially, he is a super hyped up version of almost as many cliches as you could think of.
Part of the issue with Den of Thieves is that we spend most of our time with O'Brien, and I guess he is supposed to be the protagonist that we should be rooting for. The problem is that O'Brien is a total Neanderthal. The degree to with Butler takes the 'manly' aspects of O'Brien are so annoying and irritating that I won't shy away from being redundant in my description. The pursuit of his alpha-male, top dog performance brings us a lead that is such a dick that I feel he was better suited for kicking sand in people's faces at the beach while belching out the few letters of the alphabet that he could remember. Honestly, I could not stand this character and I didn't get the feeling from director Christian Gudegast that we were supposed to dislike him.
One of the villains is a quiet bartender named Donnie (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) that gets kidnapped by O'Brien and his jackass friends who beat him into giving them information. For some reason O'Brien later makes it clear to Merrimen that Donnie talked. I believe that Gudegast did this to show some sort of unorthodox style of O'Brien, but it is so enormously stupid. There are a few times where I think we are being shown the smarts of O'Brien when it is all actually dumb, dumb, dumb. And stupid. And dumb. At the end of the movie, the robbers are stuck in traffic and O'Brien, who knows that the villains have body armour on and that they will be seriously armed, decides that they should engage in a gunfight with so many civilians around. They are in a traffic jam. They aren't going anywhere. Police officers could literally block off the road ahead of them and arrest them, but O'Brien is too smart for the logical options. Heck, the police could also have just set up lawn chairs and waited for the baddies to eventually get there.
Gudegast is really reaching for this film to be both dramatic and gritty, something that never quite gets delivered properly. As I mentioned above, the action sequences are well shot. They are tight, engaging, and look great. However, because Gudegast is trying for Den of Thieves to be dramatic we have much of the movie being people talking. I'm not against this sort of thing, but the dialogue needs to be sharp for it to work, and the script for this film isn't up to that level. The film is an absurd two hours and twenty minutes, another indicator that Gudegast believed he had more on his hands than just an action heist movie. Numerous scenes didn't serve the overall narrative and should have been trimmed.
This isn't a horrible movie. The only real issue is O'Brien is a disgustingly irritating character that ticked me off, making the movie really feel worse than it was. Other than that, Den of Thieves exists simply in a state of being okay. It's heft is rather light, and the drama is without impact. The twist of the movie isn't as smart as it believes it is, and it will probably have you asking questions over the logic of it. If you are curious about this film then I won't say stay away from it if you have a method of seeing it where you don't have to spend any money on it, such as a Netflix subscription. If you are wondering if it is worth rental dollars, it isn't. There are too many quality and intriguing heist movies available that are more worthy of your money.
Rating - 2 out of 4 stars
If you remember, I landed two and half on this because I thought there were some really well constructed action sequences. But this movie is so derivative and you can tell the director had recently watched Michael Mann's classic, 'Heat.' The more I think about it and read your review, I think my higher rating comes from the fact that I saw it in a theatre during January, the month with rock bottom expectations.
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