Review: Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (2025)
During the climax of Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, in which two sports cars race through the winding hillside outside Nice, France, trading automatic weapons fire at each curve, I got to thinking, when was the last time I watched a car chase that was this entertaining? We’d have to go back to April 2022 when Michael Bay unleashed the delightful chaos of Ambulance, a feature film that is essentially one non-stop car chase. That was almost three years ago, a lot of time to not see something as simple as a good car chase in an American movie, one that balances violence, tension, and sheer speed in the way this one does. But a good action movie that’s not also a science-fiction thriller or a comic book blockbuster is hard to come by these days (and even then increasingly rare) and Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is a good action movie.
A sequel to the 2018 cult film from Christian Gudegast, Pantera follows former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy, Big Nick (Gerard Butler), who leaves America for the greener pastures of France. Of course, he’s not just leaving his crappy job behind. He’s also tailing the one that got away, in this case, the criminal mastermind, Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), who pulled one over on him at the climax of the last film and fled to Europe in the aftermath. But when he gets to France and finds Donnie, he doesn’t bust him; the two team up to rob the World Diamond Center in Nice.
Like its predecessor, Pantera trades in well-worn story conventions. So here we get the team up between former adversaries, which gives us the pleasure of watching Big Nick integrate himself into Donnie’s crew of Balkan career criminals. Butler’s sweaty, pathetic relatability as Big Nick is something to behold in these scenes, where he initially fails miserably to gel with the Europeans, but does get a few of them to warm to him by being an absolute party animal. A scene at an outdoor nightclub where Big Nick does MDMA and then proceeds to bond with the Serbs and go wild on the dance floor is hilarious; it’s the kind of “dudes rock” hangout that these sorts of movies are made for.
It helps that Butler has become a surprisingly likeable movie star as he ages. Butler has embraced being an over-the-hill action hero, a far cry from the chiseled demigod-like alpha male of 300, and he’s all the better for it. Big Nick is a mess, but in Pantera, he’s our mess, the big doofus we root for since he has a sweaty charisma that makes him seem like one of us. If more crime movies had characters as realistically inhabited as Big Nick, we’d be all the better for it.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera depicts its characters in a more favourable light than the original, which isn’t a bad thing, as the mere existence of a sequel assumes some audience affection for the characters. Furthermore, the enemies becoming allies trope wouldn’t hit the same if there wasn’t some affection for both the hero and the villain, as well as a familiarity that makes this new narrative direction seem novel (even if it’s anything but).
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera also brings the goods in the central heist scene. Gudegast understands the essential value of procedural details in crime movies; we want to know how the sausage is made, so the more detail you can show about how a given crime is pulled off, the better. Is there any wonder we love the voiceovers in Goodfellas that walk us through bottoming out a business? Or the silent diamond heist sequences in Riffifi (1955) or Le Cercle Rouge (1970). These two films are of particular interest here as Den of Thieves 2: Pantera operates as an elaborate homage to them for 30 minutes or so. The heist scene of the World Diamond Center is the sort of patient, tense, detailed filmmaking that makes heist movies so fun to watch. We watch the crew break into the building silently and move across floors and through rooms by following the rotating time windows of the cycling security cameras (there are more floors than cameras, so the camera switches to different views on a timed sequence). There’s a certain humour in watching the hefty Butler and Jackson move nimbly through the sequence, as if these big boys were as light on their feet as mythical cat burglars, but it never distracts from the pure coolness of watching the heist go down.
Most movie franchises are beholden to their own pasts, simply recreating what they’ve done before for empty nostalgia plays. The Den of Thieves movies are recreating great movies of the past, drawing on the classics to provide entertainment for the modern age. Steal from the best. It’s what real artists do. Christian Gudegast, Gerard Butler, and O’shea Jackson Jr. may be genre artists, but they’re artists nevertheless. You can tell. Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is art too. Derivative, yes, like its predecessor, but authentically so and honestly entertaining through and through.
7 out of 10
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (2025, USA)
Written and directed by Christian Gudegast; based on characters created by Christian Gudegast and Paul Scheuring; starring Gerard Butler, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Evin Ahmad, Salvatore Esposito, Meadow Williams, Swen Temmel.
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