Let's say you're a curmudgeonly reactionary trying to find something to watch at the movies this week. The pickings, they're slim.
There's nothing new. Or, at least, nothing worth screening for critics, anyway. The only film opening wide is Winchester, a horror picture that seems to be about an heiress to the gun manufacturing fortune being haunted by the spirits of the people killed by The Gun That Won the West. Sounds charming.
No, theaters are loaded up with flicks that have been nominated for Oscars. And you, our hapless curmudgeon, are nonplussed. You've already seen Darkest Hour (which you thought was so much better than Dunkirk since they didn't erase Churchill from that one), and just know it's the best film of the year. The rest of the best picture lineup is like a parody of offerings from Hollyweird. There's the movie about a laughably diverse cabal of fish-fucking anarchists who get their rocks off by killing anti-Communist conservative Christians. There's the flick about the sexual abuse of a child in Italy. There's the Boomer wankfest about the greatness of the liberal media and the need to stand up to meanie presidents. There's a movie about a … dressmaker? For God's sake. What's a Man supposed to watch?
And then you see Den of Thieves on the marquee. You wonder what it's about. Google tells you that it's "a smoldering pile of misogyny and cheap stereotypes." Go on. It "desperately [wants] to be HEAT for a new testosterone-fueled, aggro-male generation." Keep talking! It is filled with "swagger and tough-guy posturing." I can practically hear you muttering: "Gentlemen! You had my curiosity. But now you have my attention."
Den of Thieves is relentlessly derivative, overly long, and punishingly silly—and yet, at the same time, it's pretty fun, refuses to take itself too seriously, and is shot with a sort of slick style that is never intrusive or annoying.
The immediate comparison point for Den of Thieves is Heat, if Heat were remade for morons. It opens with the robbery of an armed car by a group of technically proficient thieves who execute the guards when one of the hijackers gets an itchy trigger finger. Its inferiority to Heat is demonstrated by what happens next: rather than the robbers getting away with tact and skill, they stage a long, loud shootout with the cops—the first of several such gunfights. Den of Thieves isn't a cat-and-mouse heist movie; it's a Red Bull-fueled CounterStrike session.
Arriving on the scene after the shootout is Big Nick (Gerard Butler), who relishes in being a big dick. He leads the major crimes unit with surly swagger, showing up at the crime scene hung over and ready to vomit all over the evidence. You can tell he's a man's man because he lets the suit-wearing—get this—vegan from the feds have it. Butler plays Big Dick like he's half Pacino from Heat, half Denzel from Training Day, a tattooed super-detective who isn't above shedding a little bit of blood in order to make the streets a safer place. He's perfect: his craggy, bearded face dominating the screen in close up, his sneering laugh capably representing the nihilistic savagery of his semi-lawless team of lawmen.
Nick and his crew are lined up against Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber), a former Marine who took his skills from the battlefield and brought them to the world of armed robbery. Merrimen is joined by brothers-in-arms Enson Levoux (50 Cent) and Bosco (Evan Jones), as well as newcomer to the team Donnie (O'Shea Jackson Jr.). Their score involves absconding with cash from the Federal Reserve that is destined to be shredded: untraceable money that won't be missed and can be spent with ease.
Den of Thieves is at least 20 minutes too long, most of which could have been trimmed by excising half-thought-out mentions of Nick's family strife. Again, it's like writer/director Christian Gudegast saw Heat but didn't quite understand what made it special. Michael Mann's masterpiece is very much about family and human connection and the price we pay by excising both from our lives in the pursuit of excellence. Mann makes those connections by inserting us fully into the decay of Pacino's marriage and the rise of De Niro's relationship, by shoving us into the heartbreaking moment when Kilmer and Judd have to go their separate ways. Gudegast, on the other hand, tosses off a trio of clichéd scenes in which Nick's wife leaves him, Nick signs the divorce papers, and Nick cries a little when he thinks about never seeing his daughter again. To call these moments rote would be an insult to platitudes.
All that being said: I couldn't help but enjoy myself in the theater. Gudegast's camera glides over the streets of Los Angeles with a ghostly grace, the score's atonality calling to mind Hans Zimmer's work on another movie that leaned heavily on Heat, The Dark Knight. The shootouts are oppressively loud and senselessly violent but well executed. And the movie's conclusion is a bit silly, owing much to The Usual Suspects, but clever enough to avoid too many eye rolls.
Maybe instead of heading out to the theater—finding a sitter, paying for tickets, taking out a second mortgage to pay for popcorn and a beer—you want to stay in this weekend. There's so much stuff to watch instantly via Amazon or OnDemand, after all. Perhaps you've heard about Nic Cage's latest movie, Mom and Dad. A flick about parents killing their children? Well, Little Larry did take a while to go to bed last night. Maybe this will serve as catharsis…
The setup is simple enough: something is making parents kill their children. But only their children; other scamps escape scot-free. Voices on the TV and radio suggest it's some sort of attack—biological, chemical, or, perhaps, electronic by the way the camera is repeatedly drawn to bursts of static right before the murders begin. But the reason doesn't really matter. All that matters is we get to watch Nic Cage and Selma Blair act like complete psychos for the last 30 minutes or so of the movie as they try to rid the world of their two children.
Mom and Dad isn't good, exactly, and your enjoyment of it will depend on how much you like the gag of the central metaphor: suburban helicopter parents going nuts and doing something they would never ever do, hurt their precious offspring. But writer/director Brian Taylor does an efficient job of picking at the scab that is middle-aged adulthood, that awkward time when all of our dreams finally, fitfully die and our back-talking smartass children are at peak murderability. Anyone who doesn't admit to a moment of identification with Cage as he smashes a pool table that refuses to stay level all while complaining about the fact that he felt the need to build a "man cave" to carve out some space for himself in a world that doesn't even bother to hate him is lying. He is our collective spirit animal, swinging that sledgehammer and singing the hokey pokey as his will to live cracks under the strain of modernity.
Taylor keeps it short. At a spare 84 minutes, Mom and Dad never wears out its welcome, moving from beat to beat with minimal fuss and just enough backstory to let audiences know just why we might, ever so briefly, empathize with the murderous impulses of the rampaging adults. I mean, we need to be fair to the film's titular protagonists. Their daughter is a harlot and thief; their son ruined the interior of his dad's badass sports car. Who can blame ma and pa for going on a kill-crazy murder spree?