Starring: Gerard Butler, Pablo Schreiber, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Brian Van Holt, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Evan Jones, Dawn Olivieri, Mo McRae, Max Holloway
OUR RATING: ★★½
Story:
Heist action thriller directed by Christian Gudegast. Den of Thieves follows the intersecting and often personally connected lives of an elite unit of the LA County Sheriff’s Dept. and the state’s most successful bank robbery crew as the outlaws plan a seemingly impossible heist on the Federal Reserve Bank of downtown Los Angeles.
Our Favorite Quote:
'People with things to hide never have much to say.' - Nick Flanagan (Den of Thieves) Click To Tweet
Best Quotes
Merrimen: [to Donnie, referring to the rifle] Hey, pay attention. This is yours. Most important thing, keep your finger off the trigger at all times unless you need to shoot somebody. When the happens, hold it until you run dry.
Merrimen: Keep your eyes open. Every cop in the country is going to be looking for us.
Tony ‘Z’ Zapata: Big Nick, original gangsta cop in the flesh.
Nick Flanagan: What’s the tally?
Tony ‘Z’ Zapata: Four dead and six on the way to hospital.
Nick Flanagan: I take it he’s a bad guy.
Nick Flanagan: [to the thief] I’m going to make you a deal, give me the names of all the guys who got away and I’ll get you a medic.
Thief: I ain’t no snitch.
Bosco: You know what this is.
Nick Flanagan: It’s a decoy. We’re dealing with a different animal here, boys.
Man: We got a problem. It’s a major crime. Get to know your enemy, boys. Every big-time crew has been busted, these are the buys who took them down.
Nick Flanagan: [referring to Merrimen and his crew] Gangbangers these are not. The National Bank Hollywood jobs. We nail these guys, we solve all these cases. This is the crew.
Nick Flanagan: Whoever it is, they’re addicted to heists. Sooner or later they’ll need their fix.
Levi Enson: Anybody moves you shoot them. Do you understand?
Levi Enson: You okay?
Donnie:: Yeah, man. I’m good.
Merrimen: Change of plans, we’re trading up.
Merrimen: [referring to the Federal Reserve Bank of downtown Los Angeles] The only bank that’s never been robbed. That’s why we’re going to rob it.
Merrimen: The Federal Reserve, it’s like Fort Knox. At any one time there’s anywhere between five hundred and eight hundred billion dollars in there. Every millimeter either covered by cameras, sensor and motion detectors. Stand across the street and stare at the building for two minutes they got security on your ass. The only bank that’s never been robbed, that’s why we’re going to rob it.
Merrimen: At the Federal Reserve billions of dollars are taken out of circulation. If we can break in and steal those old bills before they’re destroyed, we got our hands on money that’s untraceable.
Nick Flanagan: We got to move.
[to Donnie; referring to the tattoo on his arm]
Nick Flanagan: Do you know what this means? It means I am a member of a gang, only we have badges, which means you are done.
Nick Flanagan: Do we look like the type that’ll arrest you?
Donnie: No.
Nick Flanagan: Put you in handcuffs, drag you down to the station? We just shoot you. Boom.
Nick Flanagan: You’re not the bad guys. We are.
Nick Flanagan: Yeah, people with things to hide never have much to say.
Nick Flanagan: Let’s pay them a visit.
Nick Flanagan: They’re casing the joint from the inside. We’re going baking.
Donnie: [to Nick and his crew] I’m going to let you know now, better wear your vest.
Nick Flanagan: The advised suspects wear body armor, head shots only.
Merrimen: On my signal, let’s go!
Merrimen: [as they are robbing a bank and holding hostages] You watching?
Nick Flanagan: Yep. How the hell are you going to get out of this?
Merrimen: I ain’t cuffing up.
Nick Flanagan: It’s okay. I didn’t bring my cuffs anyway.
Trailer:
If, by around the twenty minute mark, you feel that you’ve mistakenly walked into a retrospective screening of Michael Mann’s brilliant 1995 crime drama Heat, don’t worry, it isn’t just you who is overcome with a heavy sense of deja vu.
Let me know if this sounds familiar. A close-knit, highly organised L.A. criminal gang perform a number of meticulously planned robberies, the first one we see being on an armoured car. This particular heist goes somewhat awry when they end up shooting the bewildered guards. The gang’s leader, Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber), isn’t impressed at the loss of life, as they now will be targeted as cop killers. Other members include Levoux (50 Cent), Ostroman (Evan Jones), and driver Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.).
Turning up at the crime scene is “Big” Nick O’Brien (Gerard Butler), who heads the L.A. County Sheriff Department’s Major Crimes Squad. Full of self-confidence and swagger, O’Brien sees straight away that this crime has been committed by Merrimen’s outfit. “Big Nick”, as he is affectionately called, has a well-oiled unit of his own who are equally inseparable, including Magalon (Maurice Compte) and Zapata (Kaiwi Lyman). Their boss is always locking horns with the FBI, and they aren’t afraid of straying outside the rules to get the job done.
Said unconventional behaviour results in O’Brien turning the screws on Donnie, who already has two strikes against his name. Donnie vaguely indicates that Merrimen is planning a large scale heist, so the cat-and-mouse game begins, with each group on either side of the law trying to see if they can outsmart the other before the big event takes place.
Den of Thieves is extraordinarily derivative, liberally borrowing from other, far better films from the word go. The structure, atmosphere, pacing, look and sound are so reminiscent of Heat that Michael Mann must have come close to picking up the phone to call his lawyers. O’Brien and his colleagues’ early antics remind one of Scott Glenn’s rogue unit in Mark L. Lester’s Extreme Justice (1993), but their outwardly unlawful approach is quickly and awkwardly abandoned. There is also a Usual Suspects-type denouement which, for anyone who watches films such as this, will pick a little too easily.
Christian Gudegast, who penned the 2003 turkey A Man Apart, and the 2016 abomination London Has Fallen, makes his directorial debut here, and seems utterly afraid to put anything resembling an individual stamp on the material. He is so busy imitating Mann’s iconic film that he forgets to give the particular environment and the numerous characters that inhabit it any depth, clarity, or weight. Everyone looks serious, but the whole endeavour lacks genuine gravitas.
The technical crew can’t be faulted, as they do what is asked of them, especially the clear night photography by Terry Stacey (Spring Forward, Wendigo, The Confirmation, Elvis & Nixon), the moody score by Cliff Martinez (Drive, Only God Forgives, The Neon Demon), and the measured editing of David and Joel Cox, and Nathan Godley. It’s just a pity it all merely plays out like a facsimile of a superior effort.
Performances suffer the same fate. Butler, who has recently made a name for himself by choosing god-awful scripts, appears to be enjoying himself here, revelling in constant one-liners and muscular-if-irresponsible conduct. However, he is definitely no Pacino. Schreiber is ineffectual as Merrimen, who like the rest of his crew, feel more like constructs than real people. Once again, the detail just isn’t there, leaving the actor high-and-dry.
Jackson Jr., who is the spitting image of his father (Ice Cube), fares a little better, but plot mechanics are deemed more important than any kind of pertinent character ingredients. While looking, sounding, and acting like Ice Cube seemed appropriate in Straight Outta Compton, here it is thoroughly distracting. 50 Cent offers yet another underwhelming performance.
Den of Thieves is a waste of time, simply because its writer/director apparently has no intention of wanting to make a feature that, at least in some shape or form, he can call his own. I know it’s hard nowadays to create something truly original (especially in the crime genre), but Gudegast oversteps the boundary, riding the coat-tails of a beloved classic to achieve success, attempting to make audiences believe they are watching something more substantial than what it actually is. One hopes Gudegast is more assured of his film-making skills when he decides upon his next directorial project.
Rating: 1/5
When cops cross the line, can a “judge and jury” be far behind?
Expectations:
Automatic weapons
Precision heists
A robbers fix
Knowing your enemy
An impossible target
The other bad guys
Car chases and crashes