Den of Thieves

Clocking in at an unjustifiably long two hours and 20 minutes, this heist thriller from first-time director Gudegast fancies itself as something more than just a run-of-the-mill action flick. Although it has the smell of self-importance, like a Michael Cimino movie on steroids, Den of Thieves ultimately fools no one. It’s all about the guns: the semiautomatic ones that frequently blast with staccato fury, the muscular ones that just as regularly flex on almost every actor onscreen.

More than an homage to but less than a remake of the stylish 1995 neo-noir Heat, the film steals selective chunks of Michael Mann’s film unashamedly. The core narrative is a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse between a disciplined criminal mastermind (Schreiber, in the Robert De Niro role) plotting an ambitious burglary of the Los Angeles Federal Reserve, and a messy police detective (Butler, in the Al Pacino role) intent on foiling the crime when he’s not swigging whiskey or screwing strippers. But where the psychological depth of the principal and supporting characters in Heat ultimately trumped its cops-and-robbers premise in a surprisingly fatalistic way, this wannabe imitator only surface-mines the depths of its good guys and bad guys, despite aspirations to be something more than a shoot-'em-up at the L.A. Corral.

Like so many overplotted crime caper films today, Den of Thieves is preoccupied with elaborate machinations so improbable that it’s exhausting to follow, particularly near the end of its seemingly interminable running length. When an elaborately executed robbery depends on the preposterous ability of a Chinese takeout deliveryman to breach high-security measures in a building housing a billion dollars with little effort, you feel as duped as the guard who allows him to leave the premises scot-free.

The shrewd in-joke here is that the men on both sides of the law all resemble recently paroled gangbangers, tatted and bulked up like the cast of Oz. Indeed, the actors appear indistinguishable from one another, with the exception of Butler, who’s a movie unto himself. In a role that Russell Crowe would have surely rejected 10 years ago, Butler gets real here by going to seed: splotchy, puffy, paunchy, wrinkly. With his slicked-back hair and chains dangling atop a chest tattoo that halfway peeks out from behind a half-buttoned shirt, he looks like a molting lounge lizard in a performance that’s irredeemably hammy. There’s no mystery here: The Butler did it.