Den of Thieves (2018)
Dirty Jobs. Dirty Cops.
Action was requested for tonight, so I ended up finding what feels like the spiritual successor to Heat. For many folks, this will probably sound like a great thing. The other folks probably haven’t heard of it, or are thinking of the unrelated and not as good The Heat Get your cops and robbers costume out and be prepared to play bad cop bad cop, tonight we wade into the Den of Thieves.
We have two teams here, but they all revolve around the same story - a crime story! We have a crew of criminals, filled to the brim with ex-military types ready to make some cash and led by a guy whose made a bit of a career of it. On the flip side, we have the rugged and tumble-dried cops, who act just about as solid as the crooks in all honesty. There is more stuff to it though - the middle of the movie contains a lot of drama as well from the lead cop’s part. Home life isn’t so good when you are the equivalent of a hard-partying frat boy with attitude problems it seems. On the crime side, things go wrong from the get go with our introduction of the crew quickly flipping to cop killers, but their middle part gets some tensions added in for a brief while before we hit the final heist segment where it all comes to a fine bullet point.
Actors do a good job here. It’s almost a little sad that so many of the characters are kind of deplorable people, as when the actors do a good job it means they come as crappy people. Still, the weakest actors in here are largely just quick little side characters you barely see anyways, and even then they do a fine job of playing what’s expected. If I had to pick a weak link, it’s of course going to end up being the kids - who are in it for a very short time and at least one part of it is legitimately just “super sleepy just woke up” so they didn’t necessarily have the best to really work with in the first place. The baddies end up feeling more charismatic most the time on account of being a more finely-tuned engine than the crude and jock-ish presentation of our hard-boiled cops here, but both sides get moments where the actors get to punch through some emotion and spice things up.
Characters could have depth depending on how you look at it. For example, the troubled home life and antics of the main cop character could either be considered a decent attempt at making the character less one note and complex, or it could feel a bit like a stereotyped hard-edge cop for the sake of padding out a little run time. Most the other cops are largely just there, so you won’t be getting much out of them for character - which is mirrored over on the criminal side as well. There is a character or two that will get some more depth as the movie fills out with flashbacks and the likes, but most of the depth feeling is based more on how things are planned out or set up than it does necessarily a character-informed motive to things. They are criminals because they are and want the money I suppose, much like the cops are just cops because they are - although one could get the sense that some of it might be a power trip on both sides.
“Good” team
I’m not a huge drama person, so the middle of the movie can sag a bit when it comes to the action. It’s pretty fair to say that it’s more of a heist movie book-ended with dramatic (but not necessarily graphic) violence. There are moments during our middle section that provides some decent laughs if you have the right kind of humor - which is somewhat reflected by the entirety of the movie. This isn’t Oceans Eleven where it’s clean and family friendly - much like it’s main cop the movie is crass and rough around the edges, and some might not be fond of the language used and the overall way our folks act. That said, my earlier comparison to Heat is a pretty apt one - it’s a pretty competent heist movie, and one of the things that people are going to recommend it for is the ending shootout (which is exactly how it got on my radar in the first place). Although you’ll be able to probably do with or without some elements of it due to personal tastes, it’s not bad nor does it feel like it’s wasting your time.
The costumes are pretty normal. You know what that means - it does it’s job well even though it doesn’t stand out. Of course, when we get to any of the heist parts we get to be a little fancier - the body coverings and military gear employed by either side helps to make things pop out a little bit from just absolute normal see-it-everyday attire. Characters also all look differently enough from each other that you won’t be confusing them for each other as well, so that’s always a good bonus when you have a lot of folks wearing similar outfits or gear. Weapons and props all look great, and you get some really solid muzzle blasts and sounds for the gun fights. While the heist part is quite good at building up classic heist tensions and excitement, it really is the ending stretch after the heist that ends up being the most memorable part though. The painfully slow build of the tension right before it finally pops off an becomes an urban hell for that period of runtime is palpable, and I totally get why some would say the movie is worth watching for that alone.
Audio is pretty decent and has some solid songs in there - but I’ll be honest they are all gone by the time the movie finishes for me. I feel like there was one towards the start that I recognized, but it pretty much got overridden by the intensity of that final scene - which if I’m remembering correctly made the smart play of dropping the background audio when the time was right, fulling letting the impact of the other audio and actions play out on screen. Line delivery was well done and balancing is tight, so there’s no problems hearing things (for better or worse depending on who you ask). If you are the kind of person who likes to think about stuff, there’s probably an immense amount of things for you to attack - but also I feel like to be somewhat disappointed by. Bad cops, bad (or good?) crooks, how the money system works, home life and how toxic some folks can be - all that kind of stuff floats around in here. On the same side of that though, I feel like it doesn’t always go as deep or elaborate as some folks might want those things to go, so it can feel like you don’t always get the answers you wanted from those topics. Me - I came here for the ending scene, so most of those philosophical things are a bit irrelevant to me, and I walked out with what I wanted.
The other badguys
It’s a pretty solid movie. It’s nice to see “master cheeks” in something that isn’t a lore-offensive take on Halo so you know that it wasn’t his fault that thing collapsed on itself because he can act find and look menacing all he needs. The baddies versus bad good guys approach adds a good blurring of good and bad to keep it all in shades of grey instead of straight “those ones are the evil dudes and you should feel bad for the other ones.” The heist elements feel well thought out and executed nicely, and things are put together pretty well. There is a bit of back-and-forth editing that might at times catch a person not paying attention off guard and potentially confuse, but overall it’s a good ride.