Rating: 1.5 / 5 stars

Den of Thieves is written and directed by Christian Gudegast (“London has Fallen”), and revolves around a crack team of thieves portrayed by Pablo Schreiber (“American Gods”), Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson (“Power”) and O’Shea Jackson Jr. (“Ingrid goes West”), who attempt to pull off the biggest heist of their lives by robbing the seemingly un-robbable Federal Reserve in Los Angeles. Pursuing and attempting to put a stop to their efforts is Nick “Big Nick” O’Brien (Gerard Butler, “Geostorm”), leader of the LA county sheriff’s department and one of the most corrupt cops around.

If this sounds like a rip off of every single ‘90s heist movie that sprung up after the double release of “Heat” and “The Usual Suspects” in the same year, do not worry; that is exactly what this is. An argument one could make is that the film is simply attempting to pay homage, which is a term used to describe films that have borrowed ideas, story beats, tropes and filmmaking techniques from other films, usually in an attempt to change an element of them in order to make a film more original and unique.

That is not the case with this film, however, whose odes to previous heist films were so obvious and lazy that one could literally name the movies aloud that this one is ripping off. This movie is uninspired, unoriginal, horrifically written, lazily structured and makes little to no sense outside of the basic “bad guys want to pull off impossible heist and get chased by corrupt cops” storyline audiences have seen a million times before. To make matters even more unnecessarily convoluted and confusing, or possibly because the movie wants to seem more clever than it really is, there is this horrendously tacked-on “twist” at the end that does not affect the movie at all, changes the audience’s perception of a character in the movie for no reason, and is actually almost comedic in how unnecessary it is.

The strangest thing about this movie, however, is the performances. Despite the fact that they are all in a very lazily made movie, the cast this movie has is actually fairly talented for the most part. In this movie, Butler as Big Nick O’Brien, does a very good job displaying a wide range of emotion, somehow against all odds managing to make this character extremely charming and likeable. As for O’Shea Jackson Jr., he really does prove that he is an amazing actor because he is so much better than this role requires him to be. It almost feels like Gudegast wrote that twist at the end just because of how good he is in this role. He has this amazingly natural charisma that never once feels forced, and it really makes viewers sympathize and care about him way more so than any of his compatriots.

Unfortunately, two good performances are not enough to save this mess. For a movie that should be fairly simple in nature, there are numerous scenes that just feel thrown in that should be there to establish character motivation but just end up feeling like cutaways in a bad “Family Guy” episode. The characters themselves are written weakly and are one dimensional, with the acting unfortunately not being enough to back them up. So, when characters do get killed, viewers do not  care at all. The pacing of this movie is absolutely terrible, so much so that one almost forgets there is a shootout in this movie, until it actually happens, and even that is not enough to make it at the very least an entertaining watch.

Image from STX Entertainment via YouTube.com