Director Christian Gudegast's Den of Thieves tried to emulate the perfect heist movie in 2018 with its release, but the movie unfortunately still failed in that regard. 300's Gerard Butler led the explosive crime thriller with actors like Straight Outta Compton's O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson beside him. While Den of Thieves pillaged enough from its genre predecessors to warrant an sequel, the film still failed in very important ways.
Den of Thieves' surprising performance at the box office made that aforementioned sequel inevitable. That doesn't mean that the first film was free of fault, however. Critics were quick to point out that the Gerard Butler thriller fell short of the same films to which Den of Thieves so obviously paid homage, and the critical consensus was hard to refute. Thieves ripped off one film so poorly that some of those Den of Thieves reviews were more brutal than critical, and that ripped-off film was 1995's Heat.
Despite lifting entire characters and scenes from Heat, Den of Thieves still missed the mark by failing to understand what originally made Heat the perfect heist film. There are entire sequences in Den of Thieves where it's clear that the script's only goal was to mimic iconic moments from Michael Mann's classic. Unfortunately for Thieves, and despite the talents of the film's leading man, Gerard Butler's "Big" Nick O'Brien was a pale imitator of Al Pacino's Vincent Hanna. Heat was successful because it found a heartfelt balance between its depictions of criminals and the police in pursuit of them. Hanna was the central lieutenant in this conflict, altruistic but tragically consumed by his job. Al Pacino's larger-than-life eccentricity in the role made Hanna thoroughly engaging. Den of Thieves' Big Nick was the opposite of that. He was crass, abusive of his position, and pointedly unfaithful to his wife. Thieves couldn't tell a compelling story with such a stereotypical and tired version of the hardened police trope at the center of its tale.
Den of Thieves also overlooked the most important character when reimagining Heat's cast. In 1995 Val Kilmer played Chris Shiherlis, the gambling-addicted member of De Niro's posse who looked at the film's big heist as a means of repairing his relationship with his wife and infant child. Shiherlis was one of Val Kilmer's underappreciated '90s roles. He elevated the sense of humanity within the criminal faction and offered the most empathetic character. Not only did Den of Thieves fail to fill this role while brazenly stealing others, but it failed to give the cast any degree of humanity at all. Thieves tried to mend that error by giving O'Brien a misplaced scene where he wept over his daughter, and a glimpse at Enson's family, but those efforts came too late.
These missteps made it impossible for Thieves to stick the landing. That might be the film's ultimate transgression, as the final act of Michael Mann's heist drama was powerful and timeless. Meanwhile, the ending of Den of Thieves was mostly an underwhelming mess. Thieves' closing moments relied on the shock of a cheap narrative twist and offered nothing in the way of closure for any of the characters; there was no victory for either side of the law. Heat, by comparison, set the stage for Pacino's Vincent Hanna to move forward and rebuild the relationships he'd sacrificed for his career. Even if Thieves spent most of its duration establishing entirely unlikeable characters, a satisfying conclusion like that would have gone a long way toward improving the film.
Nonetheless, Den of Thieves 2 is reportedly scheduled to enter production sometime this year, with Gerard Butler and O'Shea Jackson Jr. in talks to resume their roles. Coincidentally, the sequel to 1995's Heat will also be coming later in 2022, as the novel Heat 2, written by Michael Mann, releases in the summer. Only time will tell if Gudegast and his cast have learned from Den of Thieves' mistakes. Hopefully the next time Big Nick graces the silver screen, he has more to say than just recycled lines from the superior heist films that came before.
