The best bad-movies know how awful they are. There’s a mutual understanding between us and the filmmakers that yes, this will be a ridiculous experience, but at least it will entertain and permit our brains to switch off for two hours. It’s the basis for most of mass entertainment. But in the mediocre heist-movie from Christian Gudegast (co-writer of London Has Fallen), Den of Thieves treats itself too seriously.
Set in Los Angeles, specified as the bank-robbery capital of the world, we follow a group of cops and a group of robbers. “Big Nick” O’Brien (Gerard Butler) is the gruff and gritty Sheriff who breaks the rules to snatch the criminals, assisted by his fellow LASD hedonists. Ray Merriman (Pablo Schreiber) is the leader of a clutch of well-trained bank-robbers, responsible for a string of recent robberies. Merrimen’s latest plan is to break into the Federal Reserve Bank, and O’Brien is on to them.
It’s embarrassing how much Gudegast wants to be Michael Mann, despite possessing none of his flair for characters or storytelling. He expects us to treat Butler as Pacino and Schreiber as De Niro, as different sides of a coin, and to salivate whenever they’re in a scene together. But there’s no point within Thieves’ 140 long and tedious minutes (half-an-hour shorter than Heat) when we care about the characters. We’re meant to care for O’Brien when he cheats on his wife and has his children taken away. Merriman’s only backstory is that he’s well-trained and was just released from prison, offering us no reason for doing what he’s doing – nothing to latch onto. When these characters cross each other, often in bloated silences and moments of silly antagonism, Gudegast expects to stutter our hearts and make our hands sweat – but instead, we’re subjected to a dull vacuum.
The heist itself is convoluted and nearly impossible to understand, never mind its lack of grounding in the real world. Gudegast doesn’t explain much of the hows and whys in the plot, in the hope that we’d sit and passively accept everything that’s happening like good, little cinema-goers. There is the occasional dip into character, but in scenes that don’t create a ripple in the story. In one off-tangent example, one of the robbers, Enson (vapidly played by 50 Cent), intimidates his daughter’s prom-date by introducing him to the rest of Merriman’s crew. It’s a funny scene, worthy of Saturday Night Live, but doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie.
There’s also an overbearing “masculinity” that runs through this film, shredding the opportunities for female roles. O’Brien’s understandably irate wife (Dawn Oliveri) is the only credible woman in the film, and most of the others are waitresses, strippers, and prostitutes. Den of Thieves pursues the Male Gaze in a way that feels dated nowadays, belonging to an era of action-movie that passed away when the noughties did. We’ve not yet escaped from it, apparently.
Den of Thieves provides good action sequences, avoiding CGI wherever possible, and possesses some moments of intended hilarity – but suffers from depthless characters, awkward dialogue, and a stupid plot. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of heist and car movies, with limbs and skin from Heat, The Usual Suspects, Reservoir Dogs, and even The Fast and the Furious. If Gudegast can’t even craft his own ideas, how can we take him seriously?
Den of Thieves is released nationwide on2nd February.
