This movie is am embarrassment
Den of Thieves takes an admittedly interesting plot outline of LA's toughest bank robbing crew with some alright twists and populates the movie with such flat, despicable characters that at best are cardboard cutouts.
The primary failure of the movie is at no point did the movie feature any actual police work. It doesn't feel like cops crossing a line. It feels like a world where there has never been a line. It feels like a teenage boy fantasy: big guns, big beefy sleeveless guys, the sounds of leather jackets.
It is such a roaring dumpster fire of toxic masculinity. In its shallow stuttering attempts at being the next Heat. Gerard Butler portrays perhaps the single biggest piece of shit nasty cop/terrible husband and father ever put to screen. For the life of me, I don't even know why he cares his wife is leaving him, but they waste precious screen time showing him sobbing in his car. Seriously though, this movie has enough man beef to jump start the cattle industry post-Covid. I wish I could have seen the budget for all the men's tank tops size: one size too small.
Our gruff lead bank robber is a man you've seen before in something or other, but this time he's got beef. Because, Hollywood loves men with 40 pounds of beef on them. He's sort of mysterious and honestly seems like a better person than Butler's detective. However, our elite crew kills a bunch of cops in the opener while knocking off an armored car. So obviously, we're supposed to hate them.
The ultimate dick measuring scene feels like its trying act as the diner scene in Heat. It's a wordless interaction at a gun range where Butler stands a few stalls down from our lead bank robber. Does Butler kidnap and torture him? No, they take turns shooting targets in the dick measuring version of Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better, and that culminates with this absurd stare down after Butler has spent the night hammering the main bad guy’s old lady.
At a point it's hard to tell the cops and robbers apart, not because they blurred the line or because the script begs the question "Who really is the bad guy?" No, it's hard to tell them apart because they all seem to have the same tattoos and where the same wife beaters. At one point, Butler points to a tattoo on his arm and asks, "Do you know what this means?" No Gerard, nobody knows what that means because all the ink feels like some producer in a design meeting said, "When I say more tattoos, I mean more tattoos."
The sound design is great. The only thing it gets close to Heat in quality is the cacophonous sounds of gunfire. Though, they over step and the sounds of Butler's leather jacket and chugging milk out of the carton comes through the speakers way too much.
The heist is actually pretty sweet, featuring a clever ruse, some suspenseful wide-eyed moments as the thieves just barely get by unnoticed. This movie hauls out every dumb trope of cops going over the line to bag the bad guy.