Den Of Thieves (dir. Christian Gudegast)

There’s an exaggerated sense of masculinity running throughout Christian Gudegast’s muddled heist thriller “Den of Thieves”: a sort of overwrought machismo set aside for only the most complex and impossible to understand alpha-males. Here, all the glitz and glamour with which our director pumps into the action sequences, Gudegast’s 142 minute cops-and-robbers tale is free from narrative coherence and progressive gender politics and rife with underwritten characterization and derivative plot devices.

It’s modern day Los Angeles: the bank robbery capital of the world as the tile card suggest. Some 9 bank robberies a day are perpetrated in the area, and seemingly elite group of renegades are the most recent miscreants. A bravura opening sequence sees our culprits steal an armored truck en route to a local bank. Though it appears their intentions are financial, it's quickly apparent when we learn the men, led by Pablo Schrieber's Ray Merrimen, need the truck to infiltrate the federal reserve branch in downtown Los Angeles; the renegades hope to steal the 30 million dollars in untraceable dumped cash. Their criminal misdeeds attract the attention of no-nonsense whiskey swigging cop Nick O’Brien (Gerard Butler) - who is in charge of the Los Angeles Major crimes unit dubbed "The Regulators". Their methods can simply be summed up by O’Briens aside to O’Shea Jackson's Donnie during an early interrogation scene in their hotel - “we’re not the cops who arrest you. We’ll just shoot you”. They're a law unto themselves, and for a while it builds toward a tale of morality in which you wonder who are the real crooks - the thieves or the law enforcement.

But any hints toward something with more dramatic weight are quickly snuffed out; It’s clear the filmmaker is only interested in the set-pieces - opting to choose for hand-held shootouts and car-chase thrills instead of dissecting the intricacies of the characters. Gudegast, a graduate of the UCLA film school previous work was limited to the script, having worked on scripts for forgettable Vin Diesel flick "A Man Apart" and recent tragedy "London Has Fallen",- also starting Gerard Butler. A native of the Los Angeles area, it's evident the director has an affinity for incorporating the landscape into this particular vehicle - the downtown vista's are akin to Michal Mann's Heat or Wiliam Friedkin's To Live And Die In LA. But it's obvious counterpart given it's setting and the subject matter is Kathryn Bigelow's fair superior Point Break, and it feels almost as if the director is attempting to recreate the nuances of Bigelow's 90's pot-boiler as opposed to creating anything original.

On a performance level, Butler has found his niche in this particular role: here, his gruff and beardy performance of the over-the-hill law enforcement agent that "gets the job done" in the most unorthodox of fashion is energetic and fun to watch. Though it’s a complicated character to pull off, made harder with Gustegad's inability to bring any real depth to the character, Butler is utterly convincing and many of his sequences in which we see his forceful brand of justice are amongst the most entertaining. Strangely devoid of humor, though there is a certain sequence in which Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson uses his fellow compadres to intimate the prom date of his daughter should garner a few chuckles even if it’s been done a hundred times, but the misguided gender politics are as visible as the lack of humor - Its doubtful anyone expected otherwise but the female characters in the film are dutifully either a scorned wife running out the door, or a stripper using her body to manipulate a man.

The underlying problem in this handsomely mounted yet uneven cops and robbers heist thriller is it failure to complete the most basic of cinematic tasks: coherent storytelling. Clearly ram-shackled and overwrought, this Southern-Californian set action thriller wants so badly to be on the same level as Mann’s Heat or Bigelow’s Point Break but there’s little depth here in the characters and you can’t miss the narrative inconsistencies.

Rating 2/5