As a movie star, Gerard Butler owns January the way Will Smith once owned Memorial Day and the “Meg” films own August. That Butler’s B-movie thrillers now hold sway over the frozen, box-office-lite oblivion of the early weeks of the year may seem a Pyrrhic victory, but at least he’s the king of something. And Butler’s brusque, beady-eyed, scowling-hulk charisma has aged well. A quick-fire actor in a caveman’s body, he has the ability to lift a piece of pulp so it almost seems like a real movie.
For much of its two-hour-and-24-minute running time, “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” the sequel to Butler‘s cops-vs.-crooks heist thriller from 2018, does a satisfying impersonation of a high-end crime film. If you want to know what makes Butler a commanding genre bruiser, look no further than the way he smokes on camera, dragging on a cigarette as if he were sucking the tobacco right into his soul. In “Den of Thieves 2,” Butler returns as “Big Nick” O’Brien, an L.A. cop at the frayed end of his tether. There’s a new team of burglars — they’re Balkan thugs who speak in knotty accents — and O’Shea Jackson Jr. is once again on hand as Donnie Wilson, who by the end of “Den of Thieves” was revealed to be that film’s underworld mastermind.
Having successfully robbed the Federal Reserve by stealing a mountain of about-to-be-shredded bills (so no one would know they were missing), Donnie escaped to Antwerp, which is where he now hooks up with Jovanna (Evin Ahmad), who leads a team of thieves known as the Panthers. (Pantera is the code name for the police task force out to stop them.) The film opens with the Panthers, disguised in SWAT gear, lifting a cache of diamonds from a jet that flew in from South Africa.
But those diamonds are just going to be the bait. In Nice, Donnie and Jovanna, posing as wealthy jewel connoisseurs, launch a plan to fence the stolen gems at the World Diamond Center, a public fortress — sort of like a Swiss bank for precious stones — that’s patrolled like a castle, with a phalanx of security guards and 137 surveillance cameras. Once set up there, they launch their real plan: to break into the World Diamond Center’s inner vault.
That’s an “Ocean’s”-level job. And Donnie, played by Jackson with a newly nimble cosmopolitan savoir faire, is going to have a partner he didn’t expect. It’s Nick, who has tracked Donnie down and wants to join the gang, which he does by parading his newly divorced, down-in-the-dumps cop’s life as a turncoat sob story. In reality, Nick wants to get his revenge on Donnie by entrapping him. But the plot of “Den of Thieves 2” is a have-your-heist-and-eat-it-too con-within-a-con, with Nick and Donnie as both adversaries and buddies. How could we not want to see them succeed?
Nick, brandishing an international marshal’s badge (it’s expired, but who cares?), has formed a hidden alliance with a Belgian police chief, Hugo (Yasen Zates Atour), which allows him to strut around the Antwerp police station mangling the pronunciation of “croissant” and generally pushing his Ugly American rebel boorishness. He does the same thing when infiltrating the thieves, and it’s a kick to see Butler take the piss out of these Euro thugs or get blasted on hashish on the dance floor.
The writer-director Christian Gudegast staged the first “Den of Thieves” as a solid imitation Michael Mann film (it was like an overboiled “Heat”), at least until the movie succumbed to more and more preposterous plotting. “Den of Thieves 2” is smoother and more all of a piece, with a story that skips around European cities and pauses for a subplot about Sardinian mobsters, who lost a giant pink rock in the jet heist. They drop Nick and Donnie into the ocean as a threat about what will happen if they don’t get it back.
The heist itself is brash, fun, and impossible to believe (which, for me, kind of tamped down on the fun). The Panthers learn that most of the surveillance-cam images aren’t visible on the guards’ monitor at any given moment; they hack the grid to learn which shots flash into visibility when. But the notion that they could somehow coordinate all this with where they are in the fortress at any given moment — hallways, elevator shaft, vault — makes little sense. Watching “Den of Thieves 2,” you don’t so much suspend your disbelief as slip it a sedative for about 25 minutes.
Yet Gudegast, for all his casualness toward plausibility, is an energizing filmmaker. He keeps the mano-a-mano standoffs humming, and he’s got a sixth sense for how to showcase Butler as a glamorously disheveled schlock version of Dirty Harry–meets–Popeye Doyle-meets– “Lethal Weapon”-gone-lone-wolf. Butler has been a star for 20 years now, and in that time he has fought an array of political terrorists (in the “…Has Fallen” films) and faced off against forces as disparate as ecological disaster (“Greenland”), Russian kidnappers (“Hunter Killer”), and anti-colonial guerrillas (“Plane”). But the “Den of Thieves” films could turn out to be Butler’s most rock-solid franchise. They’re something old that’s also new: heist movies with a death wish.
