The Best Heist Movie Of The Decade Just Dropped On Netflix
Den of Thieves: Pantera follows a time-honored tradition of transcontinental heist thrillers.
When it comes to heist movies, we owe a lot to the French. No matter if a heist's ringleader is an ice-cold, sharpened criminal tool, or a suave, romantic con man, or a fidgety, terse gangster, there exists a precedent in French genre films that inspired English-language writers and filmmakers. Films like Riffifi, Le Cercle Rouge, La Deuxième Souffle, The Wages of Fear, or A Man Escaped have a tough, unfeeling exterior that incrementally reveals the meticulous and anxious personalities that drive a bank robbery, diamond looting, or prison escape. We should think of Jean-Pierre Melville and Henri-Georges Clouzot as cinematic pioneers in the same ways that Frenchmen Georges Méliès and the Lumière Brothers lay the foundations of moving image artistry.
American crime films have leaned on the equally stylish and sordid legacy of European thrillers for decades: watching To Catch a Thief, Ronin, and Ocean’s Twelve back-to-back may give you final whiplash, but these films all juxtapose casual, anonymous vacationing with infiltrating bank, museums, and private stashes older than the United States. After Hitchcock and Soderbergh, we can now add Den of Thieves: Pantera director Christian Gudegast to the list of directors in touch with this transcontinental tradition.
Den of Thieves: Pantera, Gudagest’s sequel to his grimy 2018 crime thriller, takes its two Los Angeles natives to the French Riviera, where they must prove themselves in a daring diamond job. After the events of Den of Thieves, Nick O’Brien (Butler) is in a bad way. The secret mastermind of the robbery on the federal reserve, Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) got away scot free. But Donnie isn’t free from this Scot yet, as he follows his prey to Nice on suspicion of him planning a bigger, splashier heist with a gaggle of expert Balkan criminals. But when the French task force “Pantera” brings in “Big Nick” to identify security footage of Donnie, Nick balks and tells them that’s not his guy. Instead of putting an end to the case right there, he turns up at Donnie’s apartment, claiming to be done with being the hunter and wants in on the action.
Do we believe him? The Balkans have every reason to be suspicious. But what feels sincere is Nick’s immersion in his new heist-planning life: getting hammered at a rapturous EDM rave, joining his Balkan compatriots in chants of “Fuck NATO!”, and falling into a boyish, loyal bond with his old rival Donnie. The few scenes set in Los Angeles are not favorable to Nick: we don’t see his estranged wife and kids, nor any of his colleagues, he is blackmailed by a stripper whom he pushes for clues about Donnie. Life sucks for Big Nick, and his shifting allegiance comes across (thanks to Butler’s open-hearted, full-bellied swagger) as a genuine rush for clarity and identity after a lifetime of punishing decisions. It’s one of the major ways that Gudegast’s film feels like the shades-wearing, romantic-at-heart Miami Vice by Michael Mann— men who suppress personal demons in their procedural work, who also exorcise them by doing their job well.
Dudes rock.
Pantera enjoys the slower-paced delights that we saw in the first installment, but where the rigid order of Donnie’s crew was contrasted by the brute-force righteousness of Nick’s taskforce, we spend nearly all our time figuring out if these two outsiders can pull off the diamond exchange heist with a gang of strangers. The heist itself is deliberate, methodical, and structured around narrow time windows and a pressure to get from one end of a corridor to another — about taking as little time as possible to perform increasingly pivotal moves.
There’s a pristine — dare we say, demure — feel to the diamond extraction, and Pantera is a better film for not shying away from the biggest contradiction to any sleek, slinky heist: a grunting, bullish Gerard Butler. As if Gudegast is toying with his longtime collaborator, the heist is punishing for Big Nick — he’s too used to dominating this type of careful, calculating criminal with the righteousness of law. He struggles to lift his own weight down an elevator shaft, he accidentally cuts off his own escape route, he gets trapped in the dark with a security guard, he makes the loudest descent from a balcony imaginable.
Of course, these obstacles are all moments of hubris for a man trying to find himself in someone else’s scheme, and the final 10 minutes of Pantera turn the criminal plot in a surprise direction while offering Big Nick an uneasy rush of catharsis. Big Nick and Donnie’s fate is unclear (although the thieves will return to the den), but the corny 2010s-core needle drop that closes Pantera — “Outro” by M83 — sells the pathos of Nick’s newly liberated horizons.
“Creatures of my dreams, raise up and dance with me,” sing the French electronic artists as the world opens up to a bent cop who rebuilt himself with a finely-tuned heist. “Now and forever / I'm your king.” With Pantera, the real heist was a broken man smuggling his soul out intact. Nick is no longer “Big,” but rather a humble man; he knows his equally-dedicated compadre is in safe hands, and he no longer has to stress about when he’ll see him again: it’s in fate’s hands. Here’s to more action B-movies chasing such vibrant homosocial bonds.
