Den of Thieves

Yet another take at cops and robbers, or else Heat with a very likeable array of actors. Butler as the son of a bitch cop at last in his first great role for a long time. Schreiber makes a good opposite number. Top-notch action with a fantastic final shootout in the traffic jam. Great one-liners. Wow. (2019-03-03)

An utterly unoriginal film with very decent action and an insufferably macho Gerard Butler, whose "Big Nick" O'Brian, when not delivering macho one-liners or gesticulating in a macho way, makes chewing gum out of excess testosterone. I can get over the fact that the plot wasn't exactly original, my problem was more with the fact that the filmmakers didn't let me relate to the characters at all. So, I didn't care much about their fate and thus couldn't feel any suspense. And action films without suspense just don’t do it for me. (2018-06-24)

The script has more holes than a Swiss cheese, which you can see especially during the well narrated heist and then the final twist, which is anything but clever, even though it wanted to be something like The Usual Suspects. And what do we have otherwise? A clash of two strong personalities and a story that relies on atmosphere rather than action, which we only see at the beginning and the very end. So it's a kind of second-rate Heat, and Butler is no Al Pacino, Schreiber is nowhere near a DeNiro-type personality and Gudegast can’t hold a candle to Mann. But if don’t compare, then the emphasis on the characters, the slower pace, the atmospheric realities of L.A., and the ultra-macho Butler as we want to see him, all sat well enough with me and I'll give the four slightly overrated stars, despite the botched twist. (2018-05-16)

Gudegast has a real weakness for the duo of crime classics from the year 95. And he doesn't even try to hide it, in other words, he does his best to imitate them, from stylization to the course to individual twists. Yes, it is a “wannabe" tribute to the two classic movies made by a routine guy with no inventiveness more than anything else, but even such a second-rate non-original genre move can make you happy. And the movie is really good at it, because it hit exactly the pure essence of uncompromising macho rough crime movies. It just slightly slavishly copied scenes from the original movies, so you always know “what´s going on and what to expect". The movie should have been a little bit shorter and should have skipped Nick's family vicissitudes (they're not bad, but annoyingly clichéd and useless because nothing comes out of them), because they just obstruct an otherwise entirely nice and straightforward spectacle. It is exactly that type of manly movies, for which we used to go to video rentals in the 1990s. Moreover, this one is so good that it could almost keep up with the competition at the time. (2019-01-06)

We finally know how Heat could have looked like if Michael Mann hadn't directed it. What's missing here is the precision of direction, the plot sweep, the feel of concrete, the neon of LA and above all the depth and fatality of the characters. Macho Butler is over the top and Schreiber as a villain, though contrived, needed a more resonant persona. The most interesting character is 50 Cent, thanks to his family background. The original is the materialised reality of everyday life, but this copy is "just a film" that also tends to repeat the classics in places. For example, in the end, and then in the opening thrilling ambush of the armoured car. (2018-04-15)