Tag Archives: 2025

Reel Views, Review

Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera

Filed neatly between Cruel Intentions 2 and Dumb And Dumber To in the “Unexpected Sequels” drawer, Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera comes seven years after the Gerard Butler-fronted action thriller Den Of Thieves. It seems time has mellowed the now-franchise a bit, as the first entry was a much more brash and bawdy bank robbery saga, while Pantera generally plays things a bit cooler and more collected. A change of setting could be mainly responsible for the shift, the predecessor a gritty cops and robbers tale out of Los Angeles and the successor a Rififi riff centered in France’s World Diamond District. Crucially, returning players Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. get much more screen time together and mine terrific chemistry with each other. I didn’t know I needed a Den Of Thieves sequel but after seeing Pantera, I’d certainly welcome another.

As teased at the end of Den Of Thieves, Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera finds wheelman-turned-criminal mastermind Donnie Wilson (Jackson Jr.) overseas on the hunt for world-class jewelry. His latest hold-up at an Antwerp airport puts him back on the radar of “Big Nick” O’Brien (Butler), still out to find the culprits of the Federal Reserve robbery from the previous film. A trip across the pond confirms Nick’s suspicion that Donnie has indeed moved his operation to Europe but when the two meet, Nick claims he’s left the LA Sheriff’s Department behind and wants in on Donnie’s latest score. After some initial reluctance, Donnie invites Nick to join his band of “Panthers” to knock off the vault of the World Diamond Center in a heavily guarded sector of Nice, France.

An area that Den Of Thieves largely falters that the superior sequel streamlines is in the character development between the beats of planning the central heist. Donnie was very much a side character in the first movie, while Nick’s character moments were couched in cop clichés, exemplified by a lengthy scene where he drunkenly confronts his soon-to-be ex-wife about recently-served divorce papers. Pantera finds more success in having these two characters initially parlay with hesitancy but gradually find partnership in their shared experiences on opposite sides of the law. Does it really seem likely that Nick would team up with Donnie after the events of Den Of Thieves? Put frankly: not really. But Butler and Jackson Jr. make their time together electric enough that it doesn’t matter much.

Writer/director Christian Gudegast also lets us in more this time when it comes to the details of how the thieves are going to go about their mission. While dazzling, the extended robbery sequence in Den Of Thieves gets quite convoluted and it can be easy to lose track of what exactly is going according to plan and what isn’t. Pantera‘s major setpiece occurs around the hour-and-a-half mark and by that point, we’ve been treated to numerous insert shots and voiceovers relaying how the Panther crew is intending for things to go down. The break-in is either very quiet or completely silent but thanks to the groundwork established by Gudegast and terrific editing from Roberth Nordh, the heist is both easy to follow and unbearably tense at the same time.

Although it doesn’t always feel its length, Pantera almost scrapes up against the two-and-a-half hour runtime marker and could certainly have some fat trimmed to make the rest of the movie as exciting as the climactic burglary. Den Of Thieves had a similar issue at 140 minutes but the extraneous scenes there — most obviously one where Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s character shakes down his daughter’s prom date — seem much easier to pick out. Pantera certainly isn’t without the occasional macho posturing carried over from the original but on the whole, it’s a more mature and thoughtfully-constructed crime caper that ends with another cliffhanger. The Den might not have felt as cozy on the first go ’round but with Pantera, Christian Gudegast has welcomed in action aficionados the world over with open arms.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Opening in theaters is Wolf Man, a horror film starring Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner, following a family at a remote farmhouse who is attacked by an unseen animal and as the night stretches on, the father begins to transform into something unrecognizable.
Also playing only in theaters is One Of Them Days, a buddy comedy starring Keke Palmer and SZA, about a young woman and her roommate who race against the clock to avoid eviction and keep their friendship intact when the former’s boyfriend takes their rent money.
Streaming on Netflix is Back In Action, an action comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx, revolving around a duo of former CIA spies who are pulled back into the world of espionage after their secret identities are exposed.

Reel Views, Review

The Damned

Set during a particularly harsh winter in the Westfjords of Iceland, the new psychological horror film The Damned may not be the most comforting to watch this time of year but it might make you hug your space heater a little tighter tonight. Percolating with an icy dread at every turn, it’s a sparse and chilly evocation of how harsh conditions in nature can cause the humans braving them to create monsters that may not even be there. As the maxim from Game Of Thrones forebodes, “winter is coming” and at times, Thordur Palsson’s feature directorial debut almost plays like a spooky subplot from that series. Though the storyline sometimes moves at a glacial pace, even with a sub-90 minute runtime, The Damned is punctuated with a haunting conclusion that will be burned into my memory for some time.

Settled in a Arctic bay fishing outpost during the 1800s, the movie stars Odessa Young as Eva, who has led the crew since her husband Magnus passed several months prior. As her team of fishermen ready their longboat one morning, they see a large boat shipwreck on a set of jagged rocks in the distance. The group is split on what action to take, as Eva and helmsman Ragnar (Game Of Thrones‘ Rory McCann) deem that intervention could be dangerous, while other crew members feel it necessary to aid potential survivors. When a barrel of food washes up to their shore, Eva decides it’s worth the risk to venture out with the hopes that other capsized resources could be collected. The expedition yields unsettling results and the superstitious charwoman Helga (Siobhan Finneran) fears their actions may have caused evil spirits to travel back to their settlement.

Just as Eva has a large responsibility taking care of her people, Odessa Young is taking on quite a bit with this role and she does an excellent job holding the center during this dreary tale. We learned that Magnus died the previous winter while going out into unsettled waters, so decisions like the one Eva has to make about the capsized ship weigh heavily on her. Young displays an engaging combination of inherited resiliency and taciturn vulnerability, helping us get into her character’s headspace when the edges of her reality begin to blur. I don’t believe I’ve seen her in another film since the 2020 biopic Shirley, in which she plays a character about as different as Eva as is possible. Here, she proves she can handle a leading role with quiet command and I hope other directors will take notice.

Director Thordur Palsson, who also conceived of the story for The Damned before passing screenwriting duties to Jamie Hannigan, certainly knows how to set the mood for his frigid fable. But too often during its midsection, it feels like a film with a strong setup and an effective ending with too much blubber in the middle. Once a supernatural angle is introduced into the story, Palsson becomes a broken record with scares that don’t feel cheap but do feel redundant. There just isn’t quite enough incident here to fill a feature and I wish he had worked with Hannigan more to establish a story that takes advantage of the whole ensemble cast. The movie necessarily becomes more insular when it moves into a more subjective perspective through Eva but it suffers from succumbing to more familiar genre beats from then on.

What I appreciated most about The Damned in the final stretch is how it doesn’t get too esoteric for its own good and lets the narrative arrive at a chilling but still satisfying conclusion. Too often, I see “artsy” horror movies that don’t bother to resolve their otherworldly plot elements and simply scapegoat the protagonist’s disturbed psyche. In other words, this is not a film that falls back on an “it was all in her head the whole time” alibi. Yes, it’s still a horror movie and yes, there are scenes where the characters’ minds may be working against them, but the brutal conditions to which they’re being subjected certainly explain why things may not be quite as they seem. The Damned doesn’t completely reach its potential but it marks a solid start from a director with a knack for bone-chilling storytelling.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Better Man, starring Jonno Davies and Steve Pemberton, is a music biopic about the life of British pop singer Robbie Williams, who is portrayed as a CGI-animated chimpanzee because he’s always felt “less evolved than other people.”
Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera, starring Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr., is a heist sequel following two thieves from the original, who are now embroiled in the treacherous world of diamond burglary.
The Last Showgirl, starring Pamela Anderson and Dave Bautista, is an indie drama about a seasoned showgirl who must plan her future after the burlesque show she’s starred in for 30 years closes abruptly.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup