action, Adriano Chiaramida, Christian Gudegast, Den of Thieves, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, Dino Kelly, Evin Ahmad, Gerard Butler, Meadow Williams, movies, Nazmiye Oral, O'Shea Jackson Jr., reviews, Stephane Coulon, Yasen Zates Atour
January 11, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Christian Gudegast
Some language in French and Sicilian with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in France, Belgium, Italy, Sardinia, and the United States, the action film “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” (a sequel to 2018’s “Den of Thieves”) features a predominantly white cast of characters (with some black people, Latin people and Asians) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: An American police detective tracks down an American fugitive thief in Europe, and they assemble a team to rob a World Diamond Center in Belgium.
Culture Audience: “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and derivative action movies that don’t do anything imaginative.
Struggling for a reason to exist, “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” fails to be an exciting thriller about a diamond heist. This dreadful action sequel gets bogged down by dull pacing, wooden acting and terrible dialogue. There wasn’t a huge demand for this sequel in the first place. And if you have the patience to watch all of this sloppy and boring movie, it’s easy to see why this middling franchise has overstayed its welcome and should have ended with the first “Den of Thieves” movie.
Christian Gudegast wrote and directed 2018’s “Den of Thieves” and 2025’s “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.” The first “Den of Thieves” movie was by no means great, but it at least had characters with somewhat entertaining personalities. In “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” all of the characters have the personalities of cardboard cutouts. The action in the first “Den of Thieves” also had an adequate level of suspense. In “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” the characters do a lot of talking for the first 40 minutes of this 144-minute movie before there’s finally a big action scene.
Even though “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” was released seven years after the original movie, the story picks up less than a year after the events of the first “Den of Thieves” movie. Nicholas “Big Nick” O’Brien (played by Gerard Butler), a detective in the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department detective, is angry that he was duped by former confidential informant Donnie Wilson (played by O’Shea Jackson Jr.), who has disappeared with millions of dollars in stolen cash
Mild spoiler alert if you don’t know what happened at the end of “Den of Thieves”: Donnie turned out to be the mastermind of a massive cash theft from the U.S. Federal Reserve. While his colleagues were killed or captured, Donnie hid the stolen loot in an offshore Panama account and fled to London. The ending of “Den of Thieves” implied that Donnie’s next big theft would be a diamond heist.
Unfortunately, “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” assumes that viewers already know what happened in “Den of Thieves,” which is an annoying thing for a sequel to do. In “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” Donnie does indeed get involved in stealing diamonds. He has teamed up with a group of Balkan outlaws called the Panthers to rob an airplane flight carrying diamonds from Johannesburg, South Africa. “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” (which was filmed mostly in Sardinia) never credibly explains why this group of Balkan thieves would allow an American outsider (and potential double crosser) to join their gang.
The plane is hijacked in Brussels, Belgium, because the Panthers have disguised themselves in Police Federale SWAT outfits. The Panthers’ jewelry haul, including a rare pink diamond, is worth tens of millions of U.S. dollars. The person who owns this pink diamond is Sardinian mafia boss Matteo “The Octopus” Venzolasca (played by Adriano Chiaramida), which predictably means that he and his thugs will be looking for the Panthers too.
An early scene in “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” shows that back in the United States, Nick’s wife has divorced him and taken custody of their kids. His law enforcement reputation has gone downhill because Donnie escaped. And now, Nick wants revenge by tracking down Donnie.
So what does Nick do? He has sex with a stripper named Holly (played by Meadow Williams), who has connections to Donnie’s former gang of thieves, so that Nick can get information from Holly about where Donnie is and what he did with the stolen Federal Reserve money. After Nick has sex with Holly, he handcuffs her, interrogates her, and says he won’t release her until she tells him the information he wants to know.
However, Holly reveals to Nick that she secretly videorecorded their sexual encounter. She blackmails Nick by saying that she’ll tell him what he wants to know, but she wants a cut of the stolen money in return—or else she’ll release the sex video to Nick’s supervisors. Nick reluctantly agrees to this illegal deal. Holly tells Nick that Donnie hid the money in Panama.
In the scene with Holly and Nick, he mentions some nonsense that he can go anywhere in the world to find Donnie because he was given special U.S. Marshal authority that extends to international territories. He flashes a U.S. Marshal badge to prove it. It’s all just so ludicrous. And it’s really just an excuse for Nick to do a lot of globetrotting, but “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” is more of a slog than an adventure.
After the plane hijacking, Donnie has been hiding out in Paris, where he is using the alias Jean-Jacques Dyallo. Donnie is pretending to be a gem dealer from the Ivory Coast but is completely unconvincing because Jackson does a terrible job of trying to sound like an African who can speak French. Half of the time, he sounds like an American with a fake accent. The fake accents in “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” are unintentionally funny parts of the movie.
Donnie goes to the Nice Financial Diamont Bank to do a shady business transaction. The bank’s corrupt head of security is Chava Falcon (played by Nazmiye Oral), who works with the Panthers. In one of the movie’s most idiotic scenes, Donnie (posing as Jean-Jacques) and Chava go to the World Diamond Center to try and sell these stolen diamonds—even though in real life, these stolen diamonds would surely be on the radar of a place like the World Diamond Center, which gets alerts about high-profile diamond thefts. Chava has a colleague named Olivier (played by Stéphane Coulon), who works as the bank’s concierge.
Nick gets a tip that Donnie is in Paris. Nick goes to Paris and meets up with police chief Hugo Kaman (played Yasen Zates Atour), who leads a task force named Pantera, which has been trying to apprehend the Panthers. Nick tells Hugo about Donnie because Nick suspects Donnie is involved with the Panthers. Nick and Hugo look at surveillance video of Donnie at the Nice Financial Diamont Bank, but Nick pretends that the man in the video isn’t Donnie.
That’s because Nick has his own agenda for wanting to find Donnie. After Nick knows for sure that Donnie is in the Paris area, the next thing you know, Nick suddenly shows up at the same outdoor cafe where Donnie is eating by himself. Instead of taking Donnie into custody, Nick tells Donnie that Nick is financially broke and wants to be part of Donnie’s next heist. Donnie agrees and introduces Nick to the Panthers.
As for the Panthers, they are hollow people who are tedious to watch. Panthers leader Jovanna (played by Evin Ahmad), nicknamed Cleopatra, is supposed to be both a seductive femme fatale and a ruthless mastermind. Ahmad, who stiffly performs in her scenes, is very unconvincing in this role. Jovanna comes across as a starlet who’s more skilled at posting photos of herself on Instagram than leading international jewelry heists.
Jovanna inexplicably lets Donnie take charge of planning the Panthers’ next heist: robbing the World Diamond Center in Belgium. It’s a laughable part of the movie because Donnie can barely speak with a French accent and is an obvious con artist. In real life, professional thieves on this level wouldn’t want to have someone in charge who stands out like an obvious suspect.
The other Panthers are equally boring and superficial. Dragan (played by Orli Shuka) is Jovanna’s “intellectual” right-hand man, who doesn’t really do anything to show he’s as smart as the movie wants us to think Dragan is. Dragan’s specialty is picking locks and other security issues. Dragan doesn’t really trust Donnie, but that’s not an indication of above-average intelligence. It’s just common sense. The Panther “goons” are handsome Marko (played by Dino Kelly) and average guy Slavko (played by Salvatore Esposito), who are the Panthers members who are most likely to be able to handle themselves in fist fights.
“Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” awkwardly veers into soap opera territory in a moronic scene at a nightclub, where Nick, Donnie and the Panthers get high from smoking hashish. Nick starts dancing seductively with Jovanna. Slavko discreetly tells Nick to stop dancing with Jovanna because she’s Marko’s ex-lover, and Marko is getting upset that Jovanna is dancing with Nick. And predictably, a fist fight breaks out between Nick and Marko.
The reunion of Nick and Donnie should have brought a lot of interesting tension to the story. Instead, Nick and Donnie act like petulant teenagers who do things like argue over who’s a better swimmer. It’s all just so embarrassing to see grown men act this way. Butler (who is one of the movie’s producers) looks bored in his portrayal of jaded and world-weary Nick. Jackson’s performance as Donnie is not interesting enough to elevate this misguided film.
There’s a scene that attempts to give Nick and Donnie some emotional depth, when they open up to each other about why they chose their career paths. Donnie, a California native, says his interest in becoming a thief began when he was a teenager from a working-class/poor household and had to walk to school from his hometown of Hawthorne to Torrance as part of his school’s racial integration program.
During these walks through upscale neighborhoods, Donnie says he learned to case the houses and find out residents’ routines, such was when they weren’t home during the day. It was only a matter of time before he broke into a house. Because “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” has no imagination, Donnie is a negative racial stereotype of an African-American man who was raised by an underprivileged single mother and who turned to a life of crime. Donnie mentions that when he was a child, he witnessed his father getting killed.
Nick has his own childhood sob story, which he tells to Donnie in this conversation. His father was shot and was left with a permanent limp. The shooter was never caught. Nick says this incident motivated Nick to go into law enforcement. The entire shaky premise of “Den of Thieves: Pantera” is that Nick has decided to become a secret criminal, but it’s never believable that the Panthers would let Nick become part of their group so easily.
In a separate scene that’s meant to show Nick’s “vulnerable” side, Nick inexplicably shows up at Hugo’s church when divorced father Hugo is there attending a service with his son and daughter, who are about 4 to 7 years old. This scene is poorly written and shows Nick acting like a stalker, as he sits behind Hugo and the children, and then follows them outside after the church service ends. The main purpose of this scene is so Nick can tell Hugo that he’s a divorced father too.
“Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” wastes a lot of time on monotonous conversations and underwhelming action scenes. The first “Den of Thieves” movie had a compelling chief villain who got a lot of screen time. But “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” doesn’t have a clear-cut chief villain, which is sorely needed to maintain viewer interest in a crime movie.
On a technical level, “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” has a lot of dark and drab cinematography that makes many of the scenes look too murky and unappealing. The musical score is competently generic. Tighter film editing might have benefited this rambling and incoherent film, although the movie’s weakest link is still the awful screenplay.
The scenes showing heists and getaways do nothing clever and are just inferior ripoffs of better movies about jewelry heists. The “twist” ending of “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” makes it clear that another sequel is planned. But there isn’t enough in “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” for most viewers to care about the continuation of this disappointing story.
Lionsgate released “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” in U.S. cinemas on January 10, 2025. The movie will be released on digital and VOD on January 28, 2025.