Holy shit, this movie took the biggest quality 180-turn I've ever witnessed. About a half hour into Den of Thieves, I was ready to call it quits. Slap a 'Please stop' and a one star rating on this and walk out, but miraculously, the clusterfuck of a script climbed itself out of it's conventional and edgy teenager levels of writing. It was able to correct it's under-cooked meat and present a thrilling second and third act. I can even pin-point the minute it happened. It's when Gerard Butler is at his daughter's school, he's talking to her through the fence, but when he gets back to his car, he breaks down in tears. Seen the scenario a million times before, but from that scene on, the big heist the movie had been horribly building up to started to happen. Let me just say, the editing, deliberate lack of music, the tension, the quick camera cuts, acute attention to detail, the raw acting, is all, pardon me, really fucking good. Unlike the previous fifty minutes or so, none of the dialogue or acting felt hokey, the performances are intense, and it's mature use of weapon handling just added to the realism. It's just shocking to me, because I've seen movies like Marauders, where the entire film reeks of amateurish direction and horrible trope-y childish ideas, and the whole movie is like that. "Oh man, this thug cop who doesn't play by the rules likes to party, drink beer, smoke, and beat criminals up. He's so cool." Den of Thieves starts off in that territory, horrible, criminal levels of bad, but inverted dramatically and turned great. I want to know what happened behind-the-scenes and who wrote the first hour of the movie. Everything involving the heist and subsequent chase is great. Go see this, just show up a half hour late, you won't miss much.
When glancing at the marketing for this movie i immediately wrote it off as garbage and went into it expecting another American Heist (2014) or worse. But honestly i was very surprised by how well made this movie was.
The plot is well written with well developed characters that have unique fleshed out stories. The heists are intelligent with a lot of intricate tactics that keep you on the edge of your seat. And there was even a cool twist at the end that i didn't see coming at all. The action scenes felt gritty and were filmed really well without any shaky cam. There is also no music during shootouts, which allows the brilliant sound design to shine through and create a sense of realism.
The only thing i didn't like was how the main police officer was able to deduce complex situations by simply staring into space for a few seconds. I don't buy that someone who carries himself like a drunk moron can also become some kind of autistic genius whenever he wants. 50 Cent also looked like he was sleep walking throughout the entire movie. I wish he would stay away from acting, because he has zero charisma and it doesn't look like he is even trying to get better. Thankfully his awful acting doesn't bring the movie down too much.
Den of Thieves is definitely in my top 5 heist movies of all time right now. It's worth watching if you're a fan of the genre.
Review by Saint PaulyBlockedParent2018-02-24T12:00:32Z
Den of Thieves is like the male reproductive organ: exciting at each end but long and boring in the middle.
It's a trap most films of this genre fall into. An action scene at the beginning to grab our attention and one at the end for a climax, but in the middle nothing but cliches. And with the European version clocking in at TWO HOURS AND TWENTY MINUTES (WTF!?) there's a lot of room for cliches.
The renegade police squad as bent as the criminal gang they're pursuing is a cliche we've come to expect, but too much time is wasted demonstrating how '3-dimensional' and 'fleshed out' these men are. To be sure, there's enough beefcake here to choke the deepest of throats (Gerard Butler, Pablo Schreiber and 50 Cent are so cut their shirts keep falling off), so they're 3D and fleshed out all right, but family men? We're meant to believe they consider family important, yet the only proof of that we're given is they feel guilty every time they treat their families like shite.
It's a shame, really. Christian Gudegast does a competent job directing the action and suspense, but he should've stuck to that rather than drawing so heavily on the source material (a 1992 non-fiction book by Pulitzer Prize winning author James B. Stewart).
No, Den of Thieves is not the epic cops and robbers film it thinks it is. It's simply a giant fake boob: over-inflated, self-aggrandizing and not as unique as it thinks it is.