'Den of Thieves 2: Pantera' Is A Crime Caper Cluster-****
#304: "Den of Thieves 2: Pantera," "Small Things Like These," "Mulholland Drive," "Squid Game S2"
Edition 304:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: A truly awful heist movie, a slow burn Irish drama, an ode to David Lynch, and finally my thoughts on the new Squid Game. In this week’s trailer watch, Robert De Niro plays two roles and they’re both gangsters.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
Way too often, I reference the old Hollywood adage — if someone in the industry catches lightning in a bottle, everyone else goes out and buys bottles.
That’s how I feel about Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, which seems to have taken all of the wrong lessons from the 2018 original that become a cult hit in the years after its release.
That first movie, while obviously derivative of heist movies that came before it and dang-near owes a screenwriting credit to the movie Heat, crackled with a palpable electricity that made it feel like a train car flying off the tracks. It felt slightly edgy and unpolished, with characters who were messy and far from heroic but incredibly complaining.
Yes, the action sequences were epic and badass, but more importantly, the story was grounded. The crew of ex-military bankrobbers being chased by a sleazy cop in Los Angeles felt like something that could happen “every 48 minutes,” as the opening text says. Each character comes from a specific place and their motivations are clear to get from there to where they want to go.
The sequel is practically AI slop, abandoning all ties to its predecessor to churn out a cookie cutter international crime caper closer to late-stage Fast & Furious than any great heist movies of old.
O’Shea Jackson Jr., who was so believable as the unassuming wimp who rats to the cops in the first movie that it set up its huge twist ending, is now basically a super soldier spy who carries himself like he’s James Bond. Gerard Butler is still detective Big Nick, whose only defining trait besides drinking, smoking and shooting people is mispronouncing the word “croissant.”
Now, I don’t normally like to continue to crap on a movie that most people aren’t going to see anyway. That doesn’t do anyone any good. And I hate how frequently I’ve had to say this about new releases!
But this is an early contender for worst movie of the year. The heist itself isn’t very original and quite frankly didn’t seem all that difficult. The scenes leading up to and around it include stuff like…racing each other on electric scooters, eating gelato and watching a soccer match at a bar. Croissant jokes not withstanding, the movie takes itself way too seriously. There’s a sub plot involving the Italian mob? The dialogue is brutal, the direction is uninteresting and the story has no real stakes (including the supposed big final plot twist, which gets undone minutes later).
If the animating force behind this movie is meant to be its unchecked masculine energy — the first movie thrived on being a pissing contest between hard-o alphas — it comes in limp and worst of all…safe. Just because the characters shoot guns and drop f-bombs doesn’t stop this from being an incredibly emasculated crime movie. I can’t think of a single risky storytelling choice in the entire project.
The only way to enjoy it, really, is to turn off your brain entirely and succumb to the sheer simplicity of see-bank-rob-bank. Dudes being unabashedly dude-like, wearing leather jackets and smoking cigs, refusing to speak any language other than English, whining about ex-wives, and upholding the bro code above all number of international laws. I’m describing a very specific demographic. You know who you are.
Something New
Small Things Like These ($VOD): I’m fascinated by the Artists Equity project — Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s “studio” financing projects that promise to share more of the profits with below-the-line workers (and muscle them over the line with their collective star power). Air felt like the perfect movie for them. The Accountant 2 feels like low hanging fruit. But the fact that they decided to put their heft behind this quiet little drama about low stakes drama in a small Irish community is far more interesting.
Cillian Murphy stars as a very Cillian Murphy type protagonist, which is to say a guy haunted by past trauma who stares blankly into the distance, just like in “Peaky Blinders,” Oppenheimer and Dunkirk (even though Kieren Culkin’s shtick is the exact opposite, it’s kind of the same phenomenon — they play the same character in everything and people just continue to shower them in awards and acclaim for it).
He plays a coal merchant who witnesses some damning actions by some Catholic nuns who, because this is a small town in Ireland in the 1980s, basically run the community like mob bosses. Murphy can blow the whistle and endanger the livelihoods of his four kids, or allow the abuse to continue. It’s a compelling premise, but its glacial pace and absolute insistence upon dolling out information in tiny bits and pieces leaves a viewer doing a lot of the work to infer what the movie is actually about at any given time. Still, the movie succeeds at the very least in making you want to speak in an Irish accent for days after watching (my brother and I can personally attest to this).
Something Old
Mulholland Drive (2001, $ VOD): Rest in peace to legendary director David Lynch, whose style and personality were so singular that he’s perhaps the only filmmaker with an adjective named after him — “Lynchian” — a complement to describe stories that are bizarre, philosophical, and totally compelling. I’ll admit I never watched “Twin Peaks” or even Lynch’s other notable films (Eraserhead, Dune, etc.) but I certainly remember exactly where I was when I first saw this L.A.-set classic, and how it made me feel: completely discombobulated.
A car wreck on the eponymous street Mulholland Drive makes a woman (Naomi Watts) lose all memory, setting off a psychosexual fever dream of self-exploration that bends dreams and reality and offers little in the way of clear answers. Yes, Lynch’s movies are pretentious in that way. But it’s not prohibitive either, leaving such a strong impression on a viewer that he or she is compelled to follow the thread to some really extreme places. There’s a reason this is an all-time classic!
Something To Stream
Squid Game S2 (Netflix): I’m late to be commenting on what is definitely the biggest TV show of the past few months, but it’s worth mentioning now because it solidifies my developing theory of TV (and movies too!). Once a show is a breakout success — and in the case of “Squid Game,” a massive global phenomenon — suddenly its distributor has to think of it as a franchise (or IP) that must be preserved as long as possible. Think about how long Netflix has dragged out “Stranger Things.” Those kids aren’t kids anymore!
Because of that, we’ve seen a concerning rise in “set up seasons.” We saw a disappointing third season of “The Bear” because creator Chris Storer got talked into adding a season 3A into his pre-existing three season plan for his show. Same goes for “House of the Dragon,” and now “Squid Game.”
This second season wasn’t bad by any means, but it’s remarkable how little the plot was meaningfully moved forward across seven episodes. It felt like treading water, and I feel like that’s a lot to ask for a seven hours of content, especially since the show’s initial shock factor of gruesome deaths was no longer a surprise. It still held my attention and I burned through it, but I don’t love the idea of waiting another year to watch another seven hours in order to justify the seven I just spent.
Trailer Watch: The Alto Knights
Seems like we’ve entered the era of 81-year-old Robert De Niro’s career where he’s going to just fully embrace his hard-earned typecast as a gangster, and honestly, is anyone complaining? He’s the best at it. Truthfully, any movie about the New York City mafia I’m probably going to watch, and that’s even before you throw in the intrigue (and risk!) of De Niro playing two different parts in the same movie.
Barry Levinson has made some all-time classics (Rain Man, The Natural) and a handful other really good movies in his long career (Good Morning, Vietnam, Wag The Dog, Man of the Year), enough to make me look past the fairly long list of stinkers mixed in there and believe this could end up being a great movie this year.