How to pull off a heist
WRITER-DIRECTOR CHRISTIAN GUDEGAST ON STAGING DEN OF THIEVES: PANTERA’ S NEAR-SILENT SKULDUGGERY
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
HEISTS ARE DIFFICULT. Prisons are full of people who found that out the hard way. Similarly, movie heists aren’t a cakewalk either. And movie jail is filled with directors who found that out the hard way. In a world where Ethan Hunt can bounce into the Vatican, or the Kremlin, or an underwater vault, and use all kinds of hi-tech hocus-pocus to make off with the goods, it’s somehow even more difficult to come up with an interesting, compelling movie heist that feels fresh, tense, and thrilling. It’s even more difficult to do that when said heist is largely silent and set in France, instantly conjuring the spectre of Rififi. Yet that’s what Christian Gudegast has managed to do in Den Of Thieves: Pantera, the much-delayed sequel to his 2018 thriller Den Of Thieves. That movie itself boasted an impressive robbery, in which the Federal Reserve in LA was relieved of some of its surplus cash. But the job that Gudegast pulls off in Pantera is arguably more impressive, as his previously warring protagonists, O’Shea Jackson Jr’s Donnie Wilson and former LA County Sheriff ‘Big Nick’ O’Brien (Gerard Butler), team up to take down the World Diamond Center in Nice. And they must do so in complete silence, while navigating a maze of security cameras. It’s a genuinely thrilling, inventive, 20minute slice of pure tension, far removed from the crunching, Heat-inspired action of the first movie.