‘Den of Thieves 2: Pantera’ is a good enough piece of cinematic junk food

January has never been a month known for quality when it pertains to the yearly cinematic timeline. While everyone’s eyeballs are trained on the artier Oscar contenders, the studios dump their unwanted offspring into the multiplexes (this time last year featured such “classics” as “Nightswim,” “I.S.S.,” “Founders Day,” and “Miller’s Girl”). Every once in a while, you get a better-than-expected gem like my beloved “The Beekeeper,” an indulgent slice of junk food that hits the spot after months of vegetables. “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” the sequel to the 2018 crime film that has amassed a decent following over the years, aims to be that greasy burger you hate yourself for loving, although it leans a little too close to gas station quality rather than fast food.

Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) has moved up in the world since we last saw him, graduating from the banks of Los Angeles to the diamond district of Europe. “It’s the most secure building in continental Europe,” says the concierge to Donnie as he goes undercover as a diamond seller to provide surveillance for his crew, a line that tells us all we need to know about the outcome of this heist. ‘Big Nick’ O’Brien (Gerard Butler), on the other hand, is pissing his life away (both literally and figuratively) since Donnie outsmarted him. His divorce has been finalized, and his job security is hanging by a thread, giving him enough of a reason to embrace the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mantra and become part of Donnie’s crew.

Sequels are about doing more than the original, which “Pantera” does in a literal sense. The locations are swankier, the stakes are higher, and the plan is more complicated. However, all the supporting details are less valuable than before. The cast is less interesting, and the plot is less comprehensible, leaving you yawning throughout the first half of this 148-minute beast. The only thing there’s more of in those departments is the clichéd elements of previous heist films: people standing around the blueprint table explaining their roles, then later leaning over a balcony giving their backstory for why they got into this line of work.

Those missteps can be slightly forgiven once the sun sets and the black ski masks are donned. Writer-director Christian Gudegast showed some remarkable chops as a first-time director of set pieces with the 2018 predecessor. He levels up his game here, trading in the loud bangs of gunfire for the silence of a job that goes according to plan. There’s a great amount of tension as the crew shimmies across rooftops, moves through rooms undetected by security cameras, and places barriers at just the right angles to avoid motion detectors.

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Of course, things still go boom. Fast cars and machine guns become the weapons of choice, making this a gnarlier version of a “Fast & Furious” movie. Jackson Jr. and Butler match that brute explosiveness fairly well, although their chemistry works much better as antagonists than reluctant allies.

All of this felt a little outdated in 2018, making it straight-up ancient in 2025. But that creakiness is part of the charm, flooding in rose-tinted memories of the heist movie of yesteryear. And as long as Michael Mann keeps taking his sweet time to deliver “Heat 2,” these retrograde knockoffs are the best we’re going to get, so we might as well be content with them.

Lionsgate will release “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” in theaters nationwide on Jan. 10.

Eden Prairie resident Hunter Friesen is a film critic who owns and operates The Cinema Dispatch, a website where he writes reviews, essays, and everything in between. He currently serves as the president of the Minnesota Film Critics Association and travels the globe covering film festivals both big and small. To view his entire body of work, you can visit his website and Instagram.

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