Den of Thieves

Dir: Christian Gudegast

2018

**

It took nearly fifteen years for writer/director Christian Gudegast to get his film made, and while I congratulate him on reaching his goal, half of me wonders if he couldn’t have built on his original script a little more in that time. That said, it is quite an impressive directional debut all things considered. I can’t say I’m much of a fan of his previous screenwriting efforts (A Man Apart, London Has Fallen) and I didn’t love 2018’s Den of Thieves but it isn’t without merit. The film kicks off in Los Angeles, as we see a team of robbers led by Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber) hijack an armored truck. The hijack doesn’t quite go to plan when one of the robbers shoots a police officer and another gets shot and killed himself. Eventually, Merrimen and his crew (of merry men) escape with the empty armored truck. In the morning, Detective Nick O'Brien (Gerard Butler)  – Big Nick to his friends - investigates the crime scene, having been monitoring Merrimen and his crew for a while. Suspecting a local bartender named Donnie (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) for involvement, Nick finds him at the bar and kidnaps him for interrogation. Donnie reveals Merrimen is planning to rob the Federal Reserve on Friday of that week. He plans to do so by covertly removing about $30 million in old bills which are scheduled to be shredded after their serial numbers are deleted from computer records. At their hideout, Merrimen has one of his crew, Levi (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson), roughly interrogate Donnie to ensure he didn't disclose anything about the plan. Meanwhile, Nick goes to a strip club and finds Merrimen's stripper girlfriend, hires her for the night to find out where the heist is going to happen. She tells him and Nick and Merrimen share an awkward encounter the following morning. As the day of the heist comes, Merrimen and his crew invade a commercial bank and take hostages. Nick's team arrives outside as the chaos unfolds. The L.A.P.D. negotiator calls and speaks to the bank's manager on behalf of Merrimen. To discourage further time-wasting communications, Merrimen has one of the crew take a hostage to a back room, where he apparently shoots her. The police negotiator then agrees not to communicate again until the robbers' demands (money and helicopter) are about to arrive in over an hour's time. The thieves then blow the vault open and escape through a hole in the floor before Nick’s team come in. They also find that the shooting of the hostage was staged. The thieves needed commercial bank cash so they could make a cash drop-off at the Federal Reserve using the armored truck they stole days before. Now with a truck full of money, they make their ways to the the Federal Reserve building in full view. Donnie is hidden inside a cash dolly delivered to the Federal Reserve building by Merrimen, and he slips out during a falsely tripped alarm to collect the targeted old bills that have been earmarked for shredding, and he stashes them in bags and throws them in with the refuse, before escaping the cash count-rooms through the air ducts. The cash is dispatched from the Federal Reserve building in a garbage truck that removes shredded bills. Nick’s team catches up to Donnie and seizes him, beating him until he tells them where Merrimen is going. Merrimen, Bosco, and Levi try to make their escape with the money bags from the waste truck but hit a traffic jam and are blocked. Nick’s team spots them and attempt to shoot them as the robbers try to escape. A shootout occurs initiated by Merrimen, killing one of Nick's men. Levi and Bosco are eventually shot dead, but Merrimen gets away. Nick chases and shoots Merrimen, wounding him. Merrimen raises an empty gun to Nick, forcing Nick to shoot him. As Merrimen lies on the ground dying, Nick kneels and consoles him. When Nick inspects Merrimen's SUV, he only finds bags with shredded paper; he also finds that Donnie has escaped custody. Nick later goes to Donnie's bar and sees pictures of him with some of the crew members from the heist. It is revealed Donnie masterminded the heist to keep all of the stolen cash for himself in a second garbage truck. In the last scene, we see Donnie is now working in a London bar, planning a new heist outside the city’s diamond exchange. The film is mostly easy viewing and I liked the idea behind the heist and the story’s twist ending. It is almost palpable and it was nice seeing the small guys reaping the rewards for a change. I also like how the film showed up the stereotypical good guys and bad guys but I’m not sure if this was the intention. The cops are about as clichéd as it gets. They’re a group of hard-drinking, chain-smoking, wife-cheating anti-heroes, I’m not sure the viewers were ever meant to warm to them but then the robbers aren’t much better. This is something of a problem, while we know very little about the bad guys, we only know about Nick from the good guys. Nick spends a lot of time drinking with the guys and seems to visit prostitutes. We see his wife leave him fairly early on in the film and there is a random scene whereby he visits his estranged wife are finds her with a new fella having a dinner party. Nick comes in, drunk I think, and acts in a rather threatening manner. It doesn’t make us warm to him any. There is also another scene where Nick visits his young daughter through her school fence. These scenes add nothing to the plot or to his character and I for one still didn’t like him. The only personal scene we see of the bad guys is at Levi’s house where we see his family seeing off her daughter who is on her way to prom. The young man who picks her up is escorted into a garage where Levi’s twenty-or-so friends all surround the boy in intimidating fashion as a warning not to try anything on with Levi’s daughter. It adds nothing, other than the question of how Levi would change lifestyles when becoming a multimillionaire and whether we are convinced that he’d risk his family’s welfare on such a dangerous heist. This is tiresome action-movie territory. The film’s grand finale is a bit of a let down to be honest. The cops creep up on the bad guys in the middle of a traffic jam, forcing them to open fire. I’m pretty sure no cop would ever endanger the lives of so many in real life – if they did they would be struck-off and probably imprisoned themselves – but that is what they do in the film. The scene looks like a poor-man’s Heat. I liked the basic idea but the ending a little too close to the ending of The Usual Suspects to truly give it praise. It’s a very easy to watch action film but it is also forgettable and desperately needed fine-tuning.