Den of Thieves is a movie comprised of and crafted by bargain substitutes. Star Gerard Butler, here playing corrupt LA County Sheriff “Big” Nick O’Brien, is no Russell Crowe. His primary antagonist Pablo Schreiber, playing Ray Merriman, the leader of a crew of bank robbers, for all his charisma and intensity, is no Tom Hardy. The film’s script, with its head scratching third act swerve co-written by “Prison Break” creator Paul Scheuring, is no Usual Suspects, and no matter how moody his moonlit visuals or macho his tough guy cast, director Christian Gudegast is no Michael Mann.
Conceived in the shadow of the class Angelino cops and robbers epic Heat, Den of Thieves may have the same amount of gunfire and the same lengthy running time, but it misses the boat on what made that movie so great. It splits the difference between the pulp pop art of Inside Man with Heat’s epic tragedy and fails to satisfy the audience like the former or tell a tale as powerfully as the latter. When the film begins, it’s with an undeniably confident stride. Watching Merriman’s crew steal an armored truck outside of a donut shop in the middle of the night with their military precision and the soundtrack’s deafening gunfire sound design, it’s clear if this isn’t going to be a good film, it’ll at least be an exciting one.
But as efficiently as the narrative is set up and the characters established, the film moves at more and more of a glacial pace, going further into the core cast’s personal lives in a way deliberately designed to echo the work/home life divide of Heat’s terminally professional players. That movie worked because of the poetic dedication Michael Mann shows to depicting men and their profession. He’s an artist, not unlike David Mamet, who fundamentally understands that in today’s society, a man is what he does, and he portrays the intricacies of those professions with unrivaled clarity. Gudegast and Scheuring fill out the details seemingly at random, setting up two diametrically opposed forces but expecting us to root for the wrong one.
Instead of the workaholic detective Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna gave us, we’re left with O’Brien, a corrupt, womanizing, drug addicted blow hard who makes Bad Lieutenant look like Andy Griffith. He’s sleazy and savage in a way that’s supposed to make us envy his tough guy bullshit, but in Butler’s meaty hands, O’Brien is an objectively unlikable villain. When he’s interrogating Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), the crew’s getaway driver, he brags about how he and his fellow officers are the bad guys, a self-aware humblebrag that’s meant to identify them as antiheroes. But this isn’t “The Shield.” We don’t have seasons of television to see the complexity of these cops who cross the line enough to root for them. We just see O’Brien being an unrepentant piece of shit who cries once because his wife is divorcing him.
It’s a lot easier to be on the side of the actual criminals. In any kind of heist movie, the audience always wants to see the bad guys get away with a bunch of money, but in Den of Thieves, this is especially true. Schreiber is magnetic in an otherwise unwritten role as the outfit’s mastermind, alongside 50 Cent in a thankless role as his right hand man. Their crew is made up of ex-Marines who never harm civilians and, outside of the cops who end up killed in the film’s opening sequence, try to avoid taking lives. They move with purpose and work as a cohesive unit, making them immediately more interesting than O’Brien’s team of douchebag pigs abusing their badges for sport.
The problem comes in the film’s second half, when it becomes clear that what seemed like a clever subversion of cop movie tropes is actually the filmmakers’ collective inability to read the room. Outside of a few legitimately suspenseful robbery sequences and some well executed narrative turns, the movie devolves into an us-versus-them assault where the audience is expected to side with the wrong “us.” In a shorter, more efficient film, not sticking the landing might be more forgivable, but when viewers are expected to wait two and a half hours for a pay-off, it better be a big one.
Instead, Den of Thieves limps to a half smirk of a conclusion, proving that all the Heat cosplay was poor misdirection for a twist ending Gudegast and Scheuring were too proud of to tweak or make work with the rest of what they had already written. The result is a movie that starts off strong, has bright, well-directed moments throughout, then shits the bed so thoroughly as to undo any good will the previous scenes have built up. If anyone leaves the theater happy at the end, it’s only because they’re so grateful it’s all finally over.
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