O'Shea Jackson Jr. Archives

Review: ‘Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,’ starring Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr.

January 11, 2025

by Carla Hay

Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. in “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” (Photo by Rico Torres/Lionsgate)

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.

O’Shea Jackson Jr. in “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” (Photo by Rico Torres/Lionsgate)

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.

Review: ‘Cocaine Bear,’ starring Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Margo Martindale, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Ray Liotta

February 23, 2023

by Carla Hay

“Cocaine Bear”

Directed by Elizabeth Banks

Culture Representation: Taking place in 1985, in Georgia (and briefly in Tennessee and in Missouri), the comedic action film “Cocaine Bear” (based loosely on a true story) features a predominantly white cast of characters (with some African Americans and Asians) representing the middle-class, working-class and criminal underground.

Culture Clash: After a drug smuggler dies while parachuting from a plane with large quantities of cocaine, a black bear in a forest area goes on a rampage after ingesting a lot of the cocaine.

Culture Audience: “Cocaine Bear” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching dark and violent action comedies that are intentionally absurdist.

O’Shea Jackson Jr., Ayoola Smart, Alden Ehrenreich and Ray Liotta in “Cocaine Bear” (Photo by Pat Redmond/Universal Pictures)

Just like the bear that’s on a cocaine-fueled rampage, the erratic and unpredictable “Cocaine Bear” aims to shake up people’s sensibilities. It’s a wild and uneven ride, where the movie’s surreal comedy works well, more often than not. If you’re easily offended by the thought of children and animals ingesting cocaine, then it’s best to avoid watching “Cocaine Bear.” If you’re open to watching an adult-oriented comedy that doesn’t take itself too seriously, then “Cocaine Bear” might be enjoyable, in a way that’s similar to how people enjoy going on amusement park rides that bring some terror to the entertainment.

Directed by Elizabeth Banks and written by Jimmy Warden, “Cocaine Bear” (which takes place in 1985) is very loosely based on true events. The majority of the movie is fiction. The basic facts that the movie keeps true are that a drug smuggler in his early 40s named Andrew Thornton II (played by Matthew Rhys), who used to be a narcotics police officer in Kentucky, died in Knoxville, Tennessee, after he jumped out of a small private plane with 70 to 75 pounds (or 31 to 34 kilograms) of cocaine, and his parachute malfunctioned. (It’s the opening scene of “Cocaine Bear.”)

Before jumping out of the plane, he had dumped duffel bags filled with several bricks of cocaine in the Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest in Georgia. The most common theory is that Thornton had brought too much cocaine on the plane and unloaded some of his stash in the forest, with a plan to go back later and get the cocaine. However, in real life, a black bear got to the cocaine first and was found dead of an overdose. In the movie, the bear doesn’t die of an overdose but instead goes on a killing spree where humans are the main targets. All of the characters in “Cocaine Bear” except Thornton are fabricated for the movie. The “cocaine” seen in the movie is actually sugar or artificial sweetener.

An introduction statement in the movie explains that black bears usually don’t attack people unless it’s for reasons related to food, self-defense or invasion of a bear’s territory. “Cocaine Bear” doesn’t waste much time before the mayhem starts. At Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest, two German-speaking tourists named Elsa (played by Hannah Hoekstra) and Olaf (played by Kristofer Hivju), who also goes by the name Kristoffer, are hiking and taking photos. They see a bear acting strangely, such as dry-humping a tree.

Elsa and Olaf/Kristoffer are intrigued and want to take photos of this bear, although he is more hesitant because he heard that black bears can be deadly. According to the “Cocaine Bear” production notes, the movie’s coke-fueled bear (which the cast and crew nicknamed Cokey) is actually a combination of visual effects and motion caption imagery with stunt performer Allan Henry. In the movie, tourists Elsa and Olaf/Kristoffer are the first people who have a very unlucky encounter with the bear. Only one of these tourists makes it out alive.

The first 20 minutes of “Cocaine Bear” jump around a lot from scene to scene, by quickly showing the other characters in the movie who will encounter the bear. In St. Louis, Missouri, an international drug smuggler named Syd (played by Ray Liotta) was responsible for getting the cocaine shipment that Thornton was supposed to deliver. In real life, the deceased Thornton was found with cocaine that was worth $15 million at the time. In the movie, it’s mentioned that the missing cocaine in the forest is worth about $7 million.

Syd comically has his headquartes at Four Pines Mall, where he likes to hang out with his small crew at O’Shaughnessy’s Burger Time restaurant. Syd’s two main henchmen are his son Eddie (played by Alden Ehrenreich) and Eddie’s best friend Daveed (played by O’Shea Jackson Jr.), who is the more risk-taking and tougher of the two pals. Thornton’s death has made the national news. Syd knows that he’ll be held responsible for any of the cocaine that’s still missing—and he’ll do whatever it takes to find this stash. Somehow, Syd knows that Thornton had dumped the rest of the stash in the Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest.

Eddie is first seen literally crying over his drinks in a dive bar in St. Louis, because he’s grieving over the death of a friend/colleague named John. Eddie is babbling about how the person conducting the funeral service mistakenly called John the name Joan. It’s a rambling scene that didn’t really need to be in the movie, especially since Ehrenreich over-acts in this scene. Daveed comforts Eddie, but they won’t have much time to drown any more of their sorrows in a St. Louis bar, because Syd has ordered Eddie and Daveed to go to Georgia to find the missing cocaine in the Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest.

Meanwhile, the Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest is under the jurisdiction of a local police detective named Bob Springs (played by Isiah Whitlock Jr.), who knows that the forest is being used as a drug-smuggling hiding place for Syd and Syd’s “crime family.” Bob is determined to find a way to bust Syd and Syd’s cronies. Bob correctly assumes that there might be some of some of Thornton’s missing cocaine in the forest, and people in Syd’s crew will come looking for this drug stash.

“Cocaine Bear” gets a little sidetracked with some comedic details that don’t become very clear until later in the movie. For example, there are several minutes of screen time showing that Bob, who wants to adopt a dog, had a Maltese delivered to him instead of the Labrador Retriever that Bob originally wanted. Bob asks his police officer colleague Reba (played by Ayoola Smart) to temporarily look after the Maltese, which is a dog with long white fur that he thinks looks too high-maintenance and “fancy” for Bob. Viewers have to watch an epilogue scene in “Cocaine Bear” to see the reason why the movie keeps showing this Maltese.

Also in the Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest area is a hospital nurse named Sari (played by Keri Russell), who is financially struggling and has to work extra shifts to help make ends meet. Sari is the mother of 13-year-old Dee Dee (played by Brooklynn Prince), who has dreams of becoming a painter artist. Dee Dee’s best friend is a slightly younger child named Henry (played by Christian Convery), who has a crush on Dee Dee and spends a lot of time trying to impress her.

Dee Dee and Henry are both playful and a little rebellious. They skip school one day so that Dee Dee can go to a place in the forest’s Blood Mountain, where there is a nearby waterfall that Dee Dee wants to paint so that she can use this painting to get accepted into a prestigious art camp. A big part of the movie is about Sari trying to find “missing” Dee Dee and Henry in the forest. Because Dee Dee and Henry have gone missing on the same day that the cocaine bear goes on a rampage, you can easily predict what might happen with these two kids.

The Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest has a visitor center, where a no-nonsense park ranger named Liz Winters (played by Margo Martindale) works as a manager of sorts. (She’s the only employee of the visitor center who’s seen in the movie.) Liz tries to come across as being tough as nails, but she’s got a soft spot for an animal-rights activist named Peter (played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson, in a very fake-looking wig), who calls himself a “life inspection representative.” Peter is a regular visitor to make sure that no animals are being harmed in the forest.

Peter might be aware that Liz has a crush on him. The movie drops in some adult-oriented double entendre jokes. For example, Peter comments to bachelorette Liz about one of the taxidermy animals on display in the visitor center: “You’ve got a dusty beaver here, rancher.” Liz smirks and replies, “I’m working on it.” Later in the movie, two paramedics named Beth (played by Kahyun Kim) and Tom (played by Scott Seiss) arrive by ambulance to the visitor center in one of the movie’s most memorable scenes.

A group of troublemakers in their late teens and early 20s, who call themselves the Duchamps, have been robbing and assaulting people in the forest area. Only three of these gang members are shown in “Cocaine Bear,” and they only have nicknames in the movie. Kid (played by Aaron Holliday), also known as Stache, is the youngest and most likely to talk himself out of tough situations with an opponent. Ponytail (played by Leo Hanna) is the biggest bully in the group. Vest (played by J.B. Moore) is the most likely to get scared when things go wrong.

All of these characters encounter each other in one way or another during “Cocaine Bear.” There’s a lot of gruesome violence that looks straight out of a horror movie. However, “Cocaine Bear” is never really a horror movie because it stays consistently true to its intention of being an action comedy. The bear does some unrealistic stunts and has some human-like facial expressions that seem to be the filmmakers’ way of winking at the audience to show that “Cocaine Bear” is an absurdist fictional film.

In one of his last movie roles, Liotta (who died in his sleep in 2022, at the age of 67) seems to be having fun as the “Cocaine Bear” Syd character, which is a spoof of all the callous criminals that Liotta portrayed in his long acting career. Martindale, Ferguson and Jackson also have great comedic timing and understood that “Cocaine Bear” is meant to have a dark-but-wacky satirical tone in this story about humans versus a wild animal. The rest of the cast members are serviceable in their roles. The bear, without question, is the star of the show.

For a movie about a cocaine-fueled killer bear on the loose, “Cocaine Bear” occasionally disappoints when the movie becomes less suspenseful about when the bear is going to attack next. The adrenaline-packed momentum drags when the movie gets sidetracked with the some of the shenanigan-like conflicts between people who know about the bear.

“Cocaine Bear” also requires a huge suspension of disbelief that the local fire department (which is usually in charge of handling wild animals) wasn’t called as soon as it was known that a wild bear was killing people. Police detective Bob is the main government official on the scene for most of the movie. And there is no mention of the area being evacuated for safety after it’s known that a killer bear is on the loose, and more people get killed by the bear.

However, no one should be going to see “Cocaine Bear” for realism. Banks’ direction is solid but sometimes a little too busy and unfocused. The movie is hit-and-miss when it comes to the storytelling part of the narrative. And some of the main characters (such as Eddie and Sari) are not very interesting. But “Cocaine Bear” delivers the goods when it comes to viewer anticipation to see what this unhinged bear will do next. The movie is destined to become a cult classic for viewers who like this type of entertainment.

Universal Pictures will release “Cocaine Bear” in U.S. cinemas on February 24, 2023.