While 2018’s underrated Den of Thieves was almost too obviously inspired by Michael Mann’s Heat, writer/director Christian Gudegast turns to another action classic directed by Robert De Niro in the long-awaited sequel : John Frankenheimer’s car chase classic “Ronin”. .” When a character was codenamed Ronin at the beginning of the film, I thought it might be a coincidence, but then “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” makes it clear for the next two hours that it’s in European-set stories about international criminals – plus, including a shared setting with the Frankenheimer classic in the beautiful city of Nice, France. Both filmmakers also thrive on attention to detail, Gudegast foregoes the “Fast and Furious” option in this franchise and goes even bigger and louder with the sequel. Instead, he has delivered what could be described as a heist: a detailed film detailing a massive criminal enterprise orchestrated by two charismatic leads in one of the most beautiful locations in the world.

Nick O’Brien (Gerard Butler, in the role he was born to play) is still licking his wounds over the Federal Reserve heist from the first film, despite his superiors’ insistence that he close the case. After all, nothing was stolen. (If you’ve forgotten a 7 year old movie, the original was about a group of bank robbers who steal the “unusable” money that the Fed has taken out of the system before destroying it.) Nick knows that Donnie Wilson ( O’Shea Jackson Jr. was the mastermind behind this job, and it angers Nick that he got away with it. When bank accounts link Donnie to a recent diamond heist in Antwerp, Nick sets off for Europe, to find his man.

However, “Den of Thieves 2” is not the typical cat-and-mouse game that its structure promises. It turns out that Nick doesn’t want to catch Donnie so much as he wants to appear on his side in the police and criminal investigation department. So when he stumbles into Donnie’s latest job, planning the heist of the World Diamond Authority, he becomes a key player on his team. An almost too important player. I never quite believed how easily Nick slipped into this world, or how easily Donnie allowed it. And while Donnie is shown planning much of the elaborate crime, it feels like Jackson takes more of a backseat to Butler than necessary once the job actually comes to fruition.

By the way, it’s important to note how long it takes for this to happen. Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is more about planning a job than the job itself. It’s almost obsessive in its details about camera cycles, mistaken identities and elaborate planning. And Gudegast loves setting potential traps for Donnie and Nick, including former members of that crew who may now want revenge, and even the Italian mafia who want Donnie’s head for the Antwerp diamond heist. Although there’s some nice, simmering tension, the trailers showing almost every action moment in the film are downright misleading, and Gudegast reminds us once again that he’s practically ruthless when it comes to running time, and one relatively makes a subdued genre film (by American blockbuster standards) that runs over 140 minutes.

And yet I rarely felt the length. Once Nick and Donnie hit it off in a great drunken kebab eating scene, the film moves into its excellent finale, a phenomenal chase/shootout sequence in the French hills that has the classic action influence in The bullets once again make it clear they have a punch and the vehicular chaos feels realistically metallic, rather than the CGI cartoony nature we so often see in films like this.

I’ll admit that I kind of missed the Los Angeles buzz of the first film and the stronger supporting cast of that effort (but I also like Heat more than Ronin, so I guess it makes some sense ). Nobody’s bad here – in fact, Evin Ahmad is pretty good as a possible love interest for Nick – but Gudegast relies heavily on the excellent on-screen friendship of its two stars, who return to these roles as if no time had passed since they played them. It probably won’t take another seven years to make a third Den of Thieves movie (which I’d like to please subtitle Megadeth), and I’m here for it, almost wondering what kind of action-packed This film will be a classic in its construction. Someone sent Gudegast a copy of “To Live and Die in LA” for me.