Director: Christian Gudegast With: Gerard Butler, Pablo Schreiber, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Dawn Olivieri, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Evan Jones, Cooper Andrews, Lewis Tan, Maurice Compte, Mo McRae. Release Date: Jan 19, 2018 Official Site: Ambition isn’t a bad quality to see in a January movie. The simplest thing to call “” would be a heist thriller, but it’s a relatively elaborate one, an underworld action drama that sprawls and digresses and for a while, at least, appears to have something on its mind. The movie is set in Los Angeles, which it presents as the bank-robbery capital of the Western world, and the director, Christian Gudegast, shoots the city’s endless freeway maze with a synth-pop moodiness that’s flagrantly evocative of Michael Mann. Title: Den of Thieves (19 Apr 2010) 8.4 /10. Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating. As it turns out, the existential drive-by atmosphere of “” isn’t even the most Mann-ish thing about it. The film coasts along on parallel narrative tracks, zeroing in on a team of renegade cops, led by as a sensitive bruiser, as well as a crew of robbers who are planning to break into the L.A. Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank: an impossibly locked-down fortress of money. The intricate double storyline is an obvious knockoff of the one in “Heat” (with a distant echo of “The French Connection”), and for roughly 45 minutes of the film’s 2-hour-and-20-minute running time, “Den of Thieves” is sturdy enough to earn the comparison. More Reviews Gudegast, the screenwriter of “London Has Fallen” (this is his first outing as a director), gives good crime-noir surface. But there’s another movie whose influence hovers over this one: Bryan Singer’s “The Usual Suspects.” And trying to mirror that film’s fanciful sweep lands Gudegast in trouble. Simply put: You shouldn’t make a movie about an outrageously well-crafted heist in which your own storytelling keeps cutting corners. The most impressive thing “Den of Thieves” does is to squeeze a rare charismatic performance out of the generally inexpressive. He’s an actor who tends to lead with his dyspeptic scowl, and often doesn’t have much going on beneath it, but in “Den of Thieves” he underplays the brutish bluster, acting with a fast throwaway twinkle evocative of Russell Crowe in his prime. In an early scene, Butler’s Nick Flanagan and his team throw a boozy house party in which they shackle Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), the driver for the criminal mastermind Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber), to an armchair and beat what he knows out of him. It’s an outrageously illegal set-up, but the movie blithely winks at Flanagan’s do-whatever-it-takes philosophy, as much “The French Connection” winked at Popeye Doyle’s. Butler, towering over the other actors in his perfectly scuffed period leather jackets, makes Flanagan the kind of lewd, crude, but whip-smart joker-monomaniac that we enjoy seeing walk around the rules. Flanagan is also in the middle of a collapsing marriage, and the scene in which his wife, Debbie (Dawn Olivieri), walks out on him, taking their two young daughters, is reminiscent of the pungent domestic scenes in both seasons of “True Detective.” The movie seems to be saying that when law enforcement becomes an obsession, this is the price. “Den of Thieves” catches us up in Flanagan’s fixated gaze, and at the same time it’s in the nature of the genre that we’re rooting for the cleverness of the robbers, who are five steps ahead of the cops. In their unfolding duel, the two forces both seem to be floating above the inferno of the concrete city. Then something grippingly odd happens. There’s a charged sequence set at a Japanese hibachi restaurant, where Flanagan saunters in and makes a deliberate spectacle of himself in front of Merrimen and his crew. ![]() ![]()
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