Den of Thieves 2, now on Netflix, pulls off another great heist with a smart subgenre pivot

The original Den of Thieves was a movie cut directly from the Heat mold: a kitchen-sink heist movie with a little bit of everything. There were wives, kids, crews, and every kind of relationship drama, all held together by the glue of a cat-and-mouse race between cops and crooks — hell, even Heat threw in a serial killer plotline. But above all else, Den of Thieves, like Heat, was mostly very serious business. Sure, there was a joke here or there, but they rarely felt like a genuine invitation to laugh. However, when writer-director Christian Gudegast got the chance to make Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, which is now on Netflix, he had the brilliant idea to let his meticulously professional criminals crack a few more jokes. 

Pantera picks up right where the original movie left off: Master criminal Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) has escaped to Europe, but he can’t let his brilliant heist planning skills go to waste, so he jumps from crew to crew knocking off the most prestigious targets on the continent. Meanwhile, scumbag detective Big Nick (Gerard Butler) hasn’t had such a smooth go of life, and is still obsessing over the Federal Reserve heist from the first movie. So when Nick spots Donnie’s MO all over the jobs in Europe, he takes his lapsed status as a U.S. marshal as license to chase his white whale.

But this is where Gudegast finds the movie’s most brilliant twist: Nick muscles his way into Donnie’s crew with a cocktail of threats and sweet talk, and gets a key role to play in a major diamond heist. And suddenly, just like that, the first movie’s cat and mouse (though we didn’t know it until the end) have become best pals, and the Den of Thieves franchise has vaulted itself from straight-faced heist drama into a wonderful kind of buddy heist action-comedy. 

Like the Fast and Furious franchise before it, this move feels perfectly natural for Den of Thieves, thanks in large part to some clever character massaging from Gudegast’s script. In the original movie, Big Nick was all edges. He’s a walking threat, making everyone’s lives difficult at every turn: whether that was his wife and children, Donnie, or Ray (Pablo Schreiber) and his girlfriend. Nick moved through the world of Den of Thieves exclusively to cause friction with everyone he touched. In his own words, he was “the bad guy” — a character whose every action was designed to give us sympathy for the criminals and to convince us that the movie’s litany of shootouts were a necessity because of all parties involved. 

In Pantera, those edges have been sanded all the way down until what we’re left with is a dirtbag version of Brad Pitt’s Rusty from the Ocean’s movies. He’s still tough, sure, but he’s also a goofball. The entire first half of the movie makes him a walking punchline, whether it’s struggling to pronounce croissant or crashing a scooter after trying E. And thanks in large part to Gerard Butler’s straight-faced but very game performance, it all totally works. Nick’s transformation into a lovable lunatic fits the series like a glove, and gives it a future that’s easy to imagine — in fact, the movie’s last scene even gives us an enticing preview. 

This metaphorical tie-loosening for Nick extends to the rest of Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, too. Everyone is a little funnier and a little less tense. The heist scenes aren’t as white-knuckle, but instead are slicker and better paced, like a scene when the team has to dart from blindspot to blindspot, or shimmy across the world’s ricketiest pole to reach the safety of another rooftop. Every situation is a slightly exaggerated ante up from the original, and it all works marvelously. 

Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those recommendations where I can tell you to skip straight to the second movie because it’s clearly the direction the franchise is moving in. The good news is Den of Thieves is still pretty great, and watching the series find a totally new action-comedy gear to shift to in the sequel is part of Pantera’s charm. In other words, if you’ve already seen Den of Thieves, then you should jump to Pantera immediately now that it’s on Netflix, and if you haven’t seen either, I have the perfect crew of dirtbags and degenerates for you to spend the next couple of days with. 

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is now streaming on Netflix.