Den of Thieves

Stars: Gerard Butler, Pablo Schreiber, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Brian Van Holt, Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson III, Evan Jones, Kaiwi Lyman-Mersereau, Moe McRae, Maurice Compte

Director: Christian Gudegast

A pounding crime thriller whose villains and heroes are equally tough and given to talking like real people, not simply screenwriters' puppets.

Butler smokes, he is hard-drinking, unfailingly foul-mouthed, shoots to kill as a reflex action and is tattooed to resemble a trendy fabric design.

So, given a story of police versus a no-holds-barred gang of former military men planning the ultimate heist to rob the Federal Reserve Bank in Los Angeles, it would seem patently obvious that Butler's character, as scripted by director and co-scenarist Christian Gudegast, must surely be a Bad Guy.

Wrong.

He's the hard-nosed cop leading an elite unit of the L.A. Country Sheriff's Department against the would-be bank robbers.

Sensibly Gudegast ignores logic, settling instead for slam-bang action, thrills and suspense injected with blackly comic humour and ultimately justifying legendary critic Pauline Kael's wise comment 'Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.'

Alan Frank

USA 2018. UK Distributor: STX International. Colour.
133 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 15.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 2, Violence/Horror 3, Drugs 2, Swearing 3.

Review date: 04 Jun 2018

DVD review