Den of Thieves (2018)
Yo La Tengo’s album Electr-O-Pura has fake running times listed for some of the songs on the back cover. Not all of them, just the ones longer than five minutes. Ira Kaplan had noticed a tendency by writers to single out the longest songs on each of their earlier records for criticism and he was curious to see whether that would still happen.
Scan just a handful of the newspaper reviews for Christian Gudegast’s Den of Thieves and you’ll wonder whether the studio might have considered including similar misinformation in the press materials. “Two hours and twenty minutes!” they all cry, as if it was a sin against cinema to make a bank heist picture longer than ninety. While watching the film for the first time, it did seem obvious that there were a lot of scenes that easily could have been trimmed. It’s established early on in dialogue that Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber) is recently out of prison, then a few scenes later, we get a flashback to him being released. It serves absolutely no purpose, but it’s kind of one of those scenes that cops-and-robber movies just have. Similarly, about fifteen minutes worth of subplot involving Nick O’Brien (Gerard Butler) and his family struggles could be cut to no effect.
After reaching the end, I felt a little differently. Den of Thieves as a pure heist movie would rank as fair to below-average. The thieves’ plan is not particularly clever or convoluted, and the police led by Butler are very dumb. Without getting into the weeds involving the improbable coincidences involved in all bank-job flicks, there are two absolutely gigantic leaps of logic that can’t be hand-waved away. The detectives let the bad guys continue with their plan even after they suspect them of killing four cops. That would not happen. The final shootout takes place when the getaway car gets stuck in a traffic jam, but suddenly all of the other vehicles are empty without us having seen their passengers running for safety. Those are rookie mistakes.
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Den of Thieves’ narrative bloat, the way it shifts point-of-view several times, its use of character study as misdirection, those are choices. If executed slightly better, they might even qualify as subversive. The movie seems like it’s caught up in the macho posturing Butler and Schreiber are engaging in, but the end of the story implies that both of those guys were playing themselves. Characters coded as less traditional Hollywood alpha types were making the real power moves in the backdrop the whole time. That’s one way of looking at it, anyway. Butler’s detective and Schreiber’s crime boss do some very dumb things during the long middle section of this movie, basically stalking one another to neither character’s benefit. But in retrospect the movie knows that this is dumb.
The resolution, when it arrives, is too rapid and too unsatisfying for the movie to entirely work. But it would be less interesting if it wasn’t for all the meandering. Giving Butler so much screen time and room to really Go For It with his acting when his character never comes close to figuring out what’s really going on is sort of the point. The way Den of Thieves gives O’Shea Jackson Jr.’s getaway driver Donnie an extended introduction then forgets about him for an hour is deliberate. As much of a Heat riff as this movie is, there’s a critique embedded within it as well. Butler and Schreiber insist on seeing themselves as the white hat and the black hat, they define themselves by their one-on-one competition, and it ruins them both
It does get seduced by the obvious here and there. Producer Butler might not be entirely aware that his character is the patsy and not the hero. The crew members and cops who end up getting sacrificed by their shortsighted leaders deserve more development so we feel their loss a little bit more. But for all its odd bloat, its dismissive treatment of women, and its peculiar sense of time and location, Den of Thieves is better as a flawed long movie than it would be as a tighter, more rote one. It has more on its mind than just ripping and running, even if it often gets confused as to whether it is deconstructing male toxicity or celebrating it.
This is the third movie I’ve seen with O’Shea Jackson Jr. In fact it is the third movie he has made, ever. He played his father Ice Cube in Straight Outta Compton, not a great film. Jackson Jr. looks a lot like his dad, but he has a totally different persona. He’s thoughtful and disarming, not boiling over with rage. He was an unusual choice for Aubrey Plaza’s love interest in Ingrid Goes West, and he completely stole that movie. He’s also very good in Den of Thieves, although he doesn’t totally overcome all of the contradictions in its writing. I’m just going to throw it out right here: He should play Batman. He would be freaking great as Batman.
