Film: Den of  Thieves 2: Pantera
Cast: Gerard Butler, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Meadow Williams, Jordan Bridges, Evin Ahmad, Swen Temmel
Director: Christian Gudegast
Rating: 2.5/5
Runtime: 144 min

‘Den of Thieves’ was a humdinger of a heist thriller but this Part 2, a sequel to the 2018 cult film from Christian Gudegast, though fairly entertaining tries too hard to be smart and twisty. The original was about a group of bank robbers stealing “unfit” money that’s been taken out of the system by the Fed before it’s destroyed.

The climax of Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, in which two sports cars race through the winding hillside outside Nice, France, trading automatic weapons fire at each other, is in fact the most entertaining this movie gets. The rest is all about striving to come up with goods that could top the entertainment value of the first film.