If you filled a room with everyone that was clamoring for a second “Den of Thieves” movie, you might be hard pressed to find anyone who isn’t a credited cast or crew member, a relative or representative of one, or legendary Berlin School director Christian Petzold. Released in 2018, the crime thriller about a Los Angeles sheriff known only as Big Nick (Gerard Butler) who’s hellbent on stopping a crew from robbing the Federal Reserve — only to find that the informant (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) he was leaning on was actually playing him — hasn’t exactly made an irreversible mark on the zeitgeist. But it left the door open for future adventures, with Jackson’s smarter-than-he-looks Donnie fleeing to Europe and setting up shop in the high stakes world of diamond theft.
A mere seven years later, “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” rolled into our lives with almost as many red flags as the Chicago Bears’ coaching vacancy. If you were looking for reasons to feel confident about its prospects, your choices boiled down to a mid-January release date and a ridiculous subtitle that feels like an unserious attempt at invoking “John Wick: Parabellum.” But just like the inexhaustibly creative thieves that inhabit its eponymous den, Christian Gudegast’s sequel defies all odds en route to becoming one of the most entertaining new releases of the first 240 hours of 2025.
The lives of Big Nick and Donnie have veered in divergent directions since they last parted ways. Donnie has thrived in the world of European crime — he’s long been financially set for life, but he keeps taking on harder and harder robberies to satisfy his need for a good challenge. But back in Los Angeles, Big Nick is spiraling. The comically macho lawman built his entire identity around the notion that the bad guys never beat him. Now that one finally did, he’s unable to focus on anything else.
But every time Big Nick thinks he has a lead on Donnie’s latest nefarious deeds, his plans to investigate are shot down by superiors who insist on shielding from the public from the fact that the Federal Reserve was robbed in the first place. In their eyes, letting the thief get away with it is better than risking the reputation of the global financial system by letting everyone know there’s a bad guy to look for.
Like so many cinematic cops before him — and, in all likelihood, like so many cinematic cops played by Gerard Butler before him — Big Nick decides to take matters into his own hands. Using an expired U.S. Marshall badge that gives him the illusion of international jurisdiction, he travels to Antwerp to intercept Donnie’s latest scheme: robbing the vaults of one of the World Diamond Centers. But rather than stop the heist in its tracks and try to arrest Donnie, he comes to his old foe with a proposition: he wants in on the job. Claiming that he’s broke and tired of hunting, he lends his skills and law enforcement bona fides to a diamond heist that could solve all of his financial problems for good.
When you stop to consider how fiercely committed Nick was to stopping Ronnie’s first heist and how tortured he was by the aftermath of his failure, it’s asinine for him to turn on a dime so quickly. But “Pantera” opts to embrace the silliness, trading the cat-and-mouse game for a buddy comedy dynamic between two charismatic characters. Big Nick is a caricature in the best senses of the world, a block of testosterone and self-loathing who takes his endeavors so cartoonishly seriously that it’s hard not to be immersed in his silly adventures. Jackson embodies Ronnie with even more charisma the second time around, and his whiz kid charm serves as the perfect foil to Big Nick’s intensity. Gudegast keeps the slick set pieces moving at such a brisk pace that you’ll have too much fun to stop and consider the logic of any of it.
Even if nobody was asking for “Den of Thieves 2,” it might be time to start crossing our fingers for “Den of Thieves 3.” Frankly, I’m even more excited for “Den of Thieves 7.” Butler and Jackson’s frenemy dynamic is firing on all cylinders by the end of “Pantera,” and the overlap between the characters’ mutual respect for one another and insatiable desire to screw each other over could lead to endless future adventures on both side of the law. Each subsequent film is bound to make less sense than the last as their relationship gets more complicated — and for January moviegoers, that might be just what the doctor ordered.
Grade: B
A Lionsgate release, “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” opens in theaters on Friday, January 10.
The following article is an excerpt from the new edition of “In Review by David Ehrlich,” a biweekly newsletter in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the site’s latest reviews and muses about current events in the movie world. Subscribe here to receive the newsletter in your inbox every other Friday.
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