Lionsgate
While the Den of Thieves movies certainly don’t represent the pinnacle of the art of acting, it’s that very craft that I left the movie thinking about all the same.
Despite how beloved its predecessor has become over the years, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is arguably the more entertaining of the two. It’s breezier and bigger, looser and louder, freer and funnier — the monotone haze of Los Angeles swapped for the lush vistas of costal Europe, the grit of city streets replaced with the old-school charm of ancient cobblestones. The Pacific swapped for the Mediterranean. Other than the heists, title, and characters, not much remains from the first Den of Thieves, yet Pantera works all the same. But how? Why? The movie star performance from Gerard Butler. That’s how.
Across the film’s 145 minute runtime, the now 55-year-old Butler — almost two decades removed from his breakout performance as Leonidas in Zack Snyder’s 300 and looking like the sort of leathery, slimy, chain-smoking movie star Hollywood stopped making 30 years ago (compare how Butler’s Big Nick looks to, let’s say, Glen Powell or Ryan Gosling) — is asked to play, among other emotional registers, tough, regretful, cunning, flirtatious, brotherly, comedic, and nails it all.
Lionsgate
His role is far more James Caan in Thief than it is Vin Diesel in Fast X, even down to a table-set scene where he peels back the layers of who he is and how he became this way. Den of Thieves 2 not only leveled up in terms of filmmaking, but in its depth of character, too: Big Nick is no longer rough around the edges because he’s cool, but because he’s damaged.
While there are certainly quote-unquote “actors” capable of performing all of those notes, there certainly aren’t many movie stars, let alone action stars, with that sort of range. But Butler does. And that’s why it’s high time we started giving the Scotsman more credit: he’s not only found his lane, but he’s excelling at it and is perhaps more fully realized as a talent now than he was 10, 15 years ago.
Butler’s also seemingly developed an uncanny ability to turn what should be run-of-the-mill B-movies into franchises, as Den of Thieves not only earned a sequel, but so has Olympus Has Fallen (two of them, with a third reportedly in the works) and Greenland, the latter of which is a movie about the *end* of the world that quietly released during COVID. And it’s getting a sequel! People talk more about Greenland than the do Coda or Nomadland, the two Best Picture winners from those dark, peak pandemic years. Den of Thieves is more popular than Triple Frontier, which stars about half of the internet’s A-list movie boyfriends in Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, and so on. And that’s because of Butler.
Even the ones that don’t spawn sequels — movies with blunt-edge titles like Geostorm and Copshop and Plane — are made eminently watchable by Butler’s presence. Who the hell else is getting away with headlining an action movie named after what’s technically the safest mode of transportation? You don’t see Jason Statham starring in Car, do you?
Statham is an interesting comp, in fact — similar age, from the United Kingdom, inherently tough as hell. But whereas Statham has been playing the same character for 20 years now, Butler has figured out how to bob and weave, zig and zag, slipping into different yet traditional movie star personas based on what that film needs. The guy he plays in Greenland is far different than who he is in Den of Thieves — his character in Copshop worlds away from the one in Plane.
So here’s to Gerard Butler, whose seemingly found a middle ground somewhere between the ass-kicking of Jason Statham and the gruffness of Jimmy Caan. And that’s something that deserves to be celebrated. Now give us Den of Thieves 3.