Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera comes on like a jaundiced Eurothriller spin-off of the The Fast and The Furious franchise, a heist film packed with command rooms, superfluous computer-generated car stunts and hip-hop adjacent actors being positioned as world-class cat burglars. Pantera then the much more gently paced side mission in which Gerard Butler's extremely divorced policeman travels to Nice and cosies up to O'Shea Jackson Jr's diamond thief, eventually becoming something of a collaborator then confidant. A holiday romance told exclusively in varying shades of amber, essentially. Although writer-director Christian Gudegast's sequel may be prone to the same overplotting seen in Vin Diesel's drag racing saga, comfortably saddling itself with a pair of twists that add very little except further complication, but the specific way this well-worn story is told is just different enough to be entertaining. Following some photostat complications that place Jackson and Butler in the same Riviera neighbourhood, Pantera enjoys a pleasant Americans abroad middle-act in which the cop and the criminal bond over their shared otherness in this setting. They drop ecstasy, get into fist-fights with jealous heavies then debrief over kebabs and cans of Stella Artois. The robbery that follows is refreshingly low tech as well, repudiating high-tech gadgetry to concentrate on the Melvillian delight of stocky men clambering up giant hooks or huddling up beneath massive plexiglass shields to avoid the ever present glare of CCTV.