'Den of Thieves 2: Pantera' Is The 'Ocean's 12' of 'Den of Thieves' Movies
Plus: Tech billionaires show their true nature. Again.
This post will contain spoilers for the original 2018 film Den of Thieves.
Den of Thieves may be one of the most underrated heist films of all time.
Clocking in at a 41% on RottenTomatoes and grossing only $44MM in the US, the first Den of Thieves has often been compared unfavorably to Michael Mann’s masterpiece Heat. But sometimes, you don’t want to eat filet mignon. Sometimes, a $6 cheeseburger at your local diner will hit the spot just fine. And Den of Thieves sated that hunger with a great deal of swagger and cleverness.
At the center of Den of Thieves were Detective Big Nick (Gerard Butler), a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officer, facing off against Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber), a veteran-turned-heister trying to execute a major score against the Los Angeles Federal Reserve. Big Nick is a disaster of a human being; his home life is in shambles, he violates police procedure with regularity, and he doesn’t seem particularly good at his job. The one thing he has going for him is he really, really wants to catch Merrimen, who has a quiet and competent intensity to him. The two engage in a game of cat-and-mouse for the duration of the film and every component of the heist — from its planning to its execution — are riveting. When things go wrong (as they inevitably do in every single heist film ever made), every character in the cast gets a brief moment to share their humanity as things descend into violence and chaos. Eventually, Merrimen dies in a shootout against Big Nick.
Den of Thieves isn’t necessarily a great film but it is a hugely entertaining one, with a propulsive energy and two memorable main characters that make the journey worthwhile. It even ends with a fun twist: It turns out that a member of Merrimen’s crew, Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), was behind the heist the whole time! The first film ends with Donnie in London, about to pull off another heist.
Here’s the problem with making a sequel to your movie in which you killed your most compelling character and made it a twist that a side character was behind everything: You now need to make that side character the main character. Indeed, in Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, Donnie finds himself as the protagonist, this time gallivanting through Europe to execute his most ambitious heist yet. Big Nick also returns — his life in an even greater state of disrepair — in pursuit of vengeance and justice.
O’Shea Jackson Jr. is…fine? There’s nothing wrong with his performance in Pantera, but the original film’s dynamic in which a hyper-competent Merrimen balances out an out-of-control Big Nick is sorely misseed in the sequel. Big Nick’s character feels totally bizarre in Pantera — in Den of Thieves, he was a walking, unstable catastrophe but here, Big Nick barely has any characteristics to speak of. He’s just a mild asshole, as opposed to someone who you’d actively try to avoid at all costs. That plus the lackadaisical pacing of this film made me wonder if writer/director Christian Gudegast understood what is behind the enduring appeal of the first film.
If you’re looking for a sequel that’s similar in tone to Den of Thieves, I think you’ll leave Pantera sorely disappointed. Pantera is much more laid back and it’s all about the European vibes — a follow-up akin to Ocean’s 12. We spend a lot of time just hanging with these characters, learning their backstories, and soaking in gorgeous views of picturesque places like Nice and Sardinia. The script, quite honestly, is a mess. The film does a terrible job setting up the stakes of the main heist in this film, so much so that when the heist begins, it’s not even clear exactly what’s happening. And the plot twists (if they can even be called that) are even more wildly implausible and ridiculous this time around.
What Pantera does offer are a few well-executed heist/action sequences, some gorgeous cinematography, and the opportunity to hang with a few characters from the original Den of Thieves. In a month that’s typically filled with awful studio leftovers, I’m grateful it exists.
Mark Zuckerberg Has His Mask Off Moment
This week, Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of sweeping changes to the content policies at Meta. They included, among other things:
Ending third-party fact-checking on Meta’s platforms in the US, and replacing them with Community Notes (X’s crowd-sourced version of fact-checking)
Loosening restrictions on what type of speech can appear on the platform, and only focusing on takedowns for high-risk or illegal content — for instance, users can now call LGBTQ people mentally ill, according to the revised guidelines.
Allowing more political content back into people’s feeds
Zuckerberg’s announcement was filled with so many disingenuous statements it’s difficult to keep track. For instance, moving moderation teams out of California and moving to Texas “will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.” Because of…vibes?. Also: Community Notes often relied on Meta’s fact-checking orgs for their information — orgs that are now going to struggle to come up with funding because of this decision.
For years, Meta has made efforts to implement decent content moderation at a dizzying scale with billions of users (see Casey Newton’s history of the matter here. I also liked this Radiolab’s episode). With these changes, it seems as though Zuckerberg has decided it’s not worth it. The costs have been too high, while the reputational gain has been too low.
What will happen to the platforms as a result? There’s a ton of content that is legal but still bad for the platform and/or society as a whole. I tend to think things will devolve as Ryan Broderick predicts in his Garbage Day newsletter:
Under Zuckerberg’s new “censorship”-free plan, Meta’s social networks will immediately fill up with hatred and harassment. Which will make a fertile ground for terrorism and extremism. Scams and spam will clog comments and direct messages. And illicit content, like non-consensual sexual material, will proliferate in private corners of networks like group messages and private Groups. Algorithms will mindlessly spread this slop, boosted by the loudest, dumbest, most reactionary users on the platform, helping it evolve and metastasize into darker, stickier social movements. And the network will effectively break down. But Meta is betting that the average user won’t care or notice. AI profiles will like their posts, comment on them, and even make content for them. A feedback loop of nonsense and violence. Our worst, unmoderated impulses, shared by algorithm and reaffirmed by AI. Where nothing has to be true and everything is popular. A world where if Meta does inspire conspiracy theories, race riots, or insurrections, no one will actually notice. Or, at the very least, be so divided on what happened that Meta doesn’t get blamed for it again.
Beyond this, Meta is also making multiple org-wide changes at the company, including:
Together, these changes have created “total chaos” internally at Meta, a company that has previously had a fairly progressive outside image.
I’ve seen a lot of commentary about how Zuckerberg is bending with the political wind and kissing Trump’s ring. I think there’s certainly something to that — he obviously sees some benefit to adjusting course, especially after Donald Trump threatened him with life in prison this year. But to me, the scope of these changes go way beyond that.
These aren’t changes you make when you’re trying to appease outsiders. They’re changes you make when you’re the outsider and you’ve realized there aren’t any political or economic consequences for revealing who you really are. Combine this with the fact that Zuckerberg appeared on Rogan this week to talk about how corporate culture needs more “masculine energy” and it feels like Zuckerberg is tired of hiding his true colors. He’s seen billionaires in power like Elon Musk share their true feelings and receive zero penalty for it (and in fact, gain enormous benefits). Why shouldn’t he join them?
What remains to be seen is how usable Meta’s platforms will be after all this. The content moderation policies weren’t there just for political reasons; they likely made placed like Instagram and Facebook a more pleasant place to be. How much so? We’re about to find out.
Elon Musk Probably Isn’t Great at Videogames
Elon Musk recently streamed himself playing Path of Exile 2 using an extremely high-level character. But gamers who are familiar with Path of Exile are able to pretty easily identify the behaviors of other skilled players and it seems like Elon displays none of them. It’s pretty obvious that he’s either playing on someone else’s account or that someone else has played as him to “boost” these characters. Paul Tassi has a good rundown of the evidence for this.
What’s fascinating to me is what this reveals about his character. It’s not enough that everyone thinks he’s the richest man alive and also intelligent; he also needs to be great at everything he’s into, including gaming. Of course, if Musk actually wanted to come off as good, he could’ve put in the effort to learn how players really handle themselves in Path of Exile 2. But why do that when you can just brute force your way to the top?
(The answer: Because actual gamers will immediately realize that’s what you’ve done)
Other Stuff David Chen Has Made
On Decoding TV, Patrick Klepek and I reviewed The Pitt, which we both enjoyed. It can get pretty didactic at times but it has its heart in the right place.
[PAID ONLY] On my personal Patreon, I shared my thoughts about the hit podcast The Telepathy Tapes, whose success I think will ultimately lead to significant and unnecessary human tragedy.