The new movie "Den of Thieves: Pantera" is a sequel to "Den of Thieves," released in January 2018, during the 'January effect" period when bad or low-rated movies are released. I find it interesting that a low-grossing (80 million) movie released seven years ago would get enough production support to convince anyone that there should be a sequel. The first movie was average at best and was considered a run-of-the-mill action movie at the time.
The new film once again stars Gerard Butler and O'Shea Jackson Jr. as the only returning characters for the new movie, which does go in new directions. The problem with caper movies like this one is that almost all of them require so much setup to fill in the audience on what will happen and how it will happen, that the story slows down with too much filler, which is the case with this movie - that has too many areas that are slow.
What does work is the friendship between Nick O'Brian and Donnie Wilson, played by Butler and Jackson. There is some story trickery at the end, that I thought worked well, and a car chase and gun shooting scene through the winding roads of a mountain that was very well filmed. Unfortunately, the end of this chase scene involved a completely illogical appearance of other criminals at the top of this mountain, when there was no way they could have been there. Continuity, and logic errors like this, especially in an action movie can not only ruin a scene but in some cases, the entire film.
It is interesting to see Gerard Butler who starred in the great film "Olympus Has Fallen", released in 2013, trying to recreate that huge hit with another action movie as good or even better. So far, this has not happened, more evidence of how difficult it is to write and produce a highly rated box office hit in the movie industry.
The Rotten Tomatoes reviews for this film are a low 62% with my rating around 70% and a mild recommendation.
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