Time: 144 Minutes
Age Rating: M – Violence, offensive language, drug use & sexual references
Cast:
Gerard Butler as Nicholas “Big Nick” O’Brien
O’Shea Jackson Jr. as Donnie Wilson “Jean-Jacques”
Evin Ahmad as Jovanna “Cleopatra”
Meadow Williams as Holly
Salvatore Esposito as Slavko
Swen Temmel as Milan Lovren
Director: Christian Gudegast

The first Den of Thieves was a pretty good movie and enjoyable throwback to L.A. based heist films like Heat. The ending set up a sequel, but after a number of years of being in development, it didn’t seem like it would happen. 7 years later however, we finally got that sequel with Pantera, and I think it lived up to all the wait.

Pantera is a very different kind of movie from its predecessor. As I said earlier, Den of Thieves was a throwback to LA based heist movies like Heat, and was pretty serious in tone despite its more macho B-movie take. The sequel is a distinctly different kind of movie from its predecessor in some ways. The first movie was somewhat character driven, but we get even more of it here with the closer focus on Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr’s characters. It’s tonally lighter than its predecessor, especially with the buddy action dynamic that the leads share and the humour comes from it. It’s also surprisingly emotional in parts. One way that it is similar to the first movie is that it’s around 2 hours and 20 minutes, and which was again a little longer than it needed to be, especially on the earlier parts of the movie.

The cast on the whole are good, but it largely comes down to Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr., who reprise their roles from the previous movie and are really good once again. They have such great chemistry together and I think the dynamic between them is what makes me favour this movie over the previous one. Butler particularly cements Big Nick as his best character yet, some pathos is really brought to him as he goes from being a sheriff who chased robbers to now being one of the robbers and is having an existential crisis.

Christian Gudegast returns to direct the Den of Thieves sequel and his work is once again quite good, with the action and heist scenes particularly being handled very well. The music is good too, though I was missing the Cliff Martinez score from the first film.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is an entertaining heist movie, well directed, and Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. are really good in their parts. A distinctly different sequel which surpasses its predecessor.