English
Gamereactor
movie reviews
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

Christian Gudegast's brutal action thriller stands as one of the best in the heist genre, while the streaming sequel is a downright disappointment...

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field

Let me start by getting this off my chest. Regardless of the massive criticism it received when it was first released, seven years ago, I loved Den of Thieves. I've seen it probably ten times and consider it the perfect mix of The Town, Training Day, and Heat, with clear B-movie tendencies and tons of character, nerve, and personality. It's gritty, dark, and thrilling and I love everything from the characters to the storytelling itself. That said, I never wanted a sequel. It was never needed and after watching Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, I'm even more convinced that it should never have been made. Because it's pointless... completely pointless.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
99% of all the new characters are 100% completely pointless.

Pantera opens with the morally corrupt cop Big Nick (Gerard Butler) travelling to Europe to try and track down Donnie, who at the end of the previous film went to England after a bank heist. He finds Donnie, who has been living on the edge for the past year and is now ripping off the Serbian mafia in southern Israel, posing as a French diamond smuggler. Nick believes he is entitled to a share of the loot Donnie is now looking to claim for his own and teams up with his former arch-rival to snatch the expensive gems. The road to get to this point is a tortuous mess, and much of Pantera is not connected to other parts. Nick's performance as a diamond robber is mostly pointless since, as an ex-cop, he adds nothing to the already seasoned gang of criminals and his relationship with Donnie is, according to director and screenwriter Christian Gudegast, supposed to mimic that between Dominic Torreto and Luke Hobbs, who also started their careers on opposite sides of the law but then had to try to work around their differences to reach a common goal.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
The first film had nerve, darkness, pace, and strong characters. Pantera has none of that.

Pantera is long, too long. Two hours and 24 hours minutes to be precise, which is about an hour too long if I was being specific. The story and the new characters are neither interesting enough nor nuanced enough to build a story that doesn't bore in a way that the first film never did. Gudegast has obviously watched some European crime shows and got hooked on Fast and the Furious and in the process lost his way, lost Nick, lost Donnie, and missed the tone of its predecessor altogether. In fact, Pantera feels like a long-winded, bad episode of a mediocre TV series rather than a lavish, long-awaited sequel to a masterful action thriller heavily inspired by the genre's top bank robbery flicks.

This is an ad:

Butler does his best to find his way with this blunt, hardened ex-cop but even that doesn't work due to poor writing and bad direction. And that's a real shame and very sad considering how much I would have liked to have seen a quality sequel here.

04 Gamereactor UK
4 / 10
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

Related texts

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

MOVIE REVIEW. Written by Petter Hegevall

Christian Gudegast's brutal action thriller stands as one of the best in the heist genre, while the streaming sequel is a downright disappointment...



Loading next content