BEFORE: Sometimes it's about which films I don't watch - like I could have dropped in this movie "Howl" about Allen Ginsberg, which has Jon Hamm in it, and it could have fit easily between "Richard Jewell" and "The Report". Only it's off-theme, and I don't care about beatnik poetry - it's OK, I've passed on that film before, it's available free on Tubi or IMDB.com and there are other ways to link to it.
Similarly, I could have dropped in "Straight Outta Compton" after yesterday's film, only it's off-theme and I don't care about rap music. Anyway, I'm trying to land the right films on Mother's Day weekend, and for that, my list needs to be streamlined to bring things in on schedule.
So O'Shea Jackson Jr. carries over from "Just Mercy".
THE PLOT: An elite unit of the LA County Sheriff's Dept. and the state's most successful bank robbery crew clash as the outlaws plan a seemingly impossible heist on the Federal Reserve Bank.
AFTER: I suppose it's worth it, suffering through some dry legal dramas if there's an action-packed heist film waiting at the end of the month. (I'll total up the April stats for tomorrow's post.). And this is a good one, the second armored-car heist film in a week, but that's either just coincidence or good unintentional planning. See, we used to have these things called banks, and people would go there and deposit their money or withdraw some to pay for material goods, but that was back before everything was digital, and we all took photos of our paychecks and did our banking from home.
It's a well-planned twisty heist film, too - and I liked the symmetry of having a squad of detectives who might not play by the rules to contrast the crew of bank robbers who have something akin to a moral code. They'll shoot bank guards, for example, but never civilians. And the leader of the cops is going through a tough time, his wife files for divorce while he's trying to track down the robbers, so it's not too far-fetched to suspect that he might be working both sides, or looking for a payoff somehow. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The first thing that happens is the crew steals an armored car - but with no money in it. The cops seem quite confused by this, who steals an empty bank car? I could think of several reasons, and there's one that's glaringly obvious, I'm just a bit surprised that the cops couldn't figure it out. But two things then happen that raise the stakes, the thieves send a man to do surveillance on the crime scene, so they'll know who's in charge of the investigation, and the cops manage to determine fairly quickly who's at large and in charge, so everyone figures out who their enemies are pretty early on. All that is just a wee bit contrived, but it's a minor fault.
What follows turns into a game of "I know what you're doing," followed by "I know you know what I'm doing," followed by "I know that you know that I know what you're doing" and so on. The lead cop tries to shake down the driver, a low-level member of the thieves, only then the driver doesn't tell his crew that he got shaken down. At first this didn't seem to make sense, because if you're part of a crew and you know the cops are on to you, why wouldn't you alert the rest of the crew? But he must have had his reasons, perhaps he was thinking ahead to avoiding prosecution down the line. Still, you'd think it would be a better plan to call off the whole heist if there were any danger of it going south. Trust me, stick with this one and nearly everything makes sense, eventually.
The thieves have their eye on the U.S. Federal Reserve bank, and there's an elaborate plan that involves that armored car, plus some technology, plus an intimate understanding of how the government takes bills out of circulation. It all seems very far-fetched, but again, it all ends up making some sense in the long run. Then, instead of hitting the Federal Reserve, the crew goes and knocks off a small bank in the L.A. suburbs - and they actually WANT the cop unit to know about it. At this point I was VERY confused, like, what happened to the Federal Reserve? Again, don't give up, stick with this one and nearly everything makes sense, eventually.
I don't want to say any more about the plot, but there were some nice surprises at the end, ones that may convince you to watch the whole film a second time with fresh eyes and new knowledge. When you Google the title of this film, one of the auto-fill choices is "Den of Thieves Ending Explained", so that should give you some idea, without me saying any more, or invoking another particular, more famous film's ending that's (sort of?) similar.
I had many theories during the film about what was really going on. Was the lead cop partners with the lead bank robber? What was in that text that the lead cop accidentally sent to his wife, who was that directed at? And what was up with that guy who owned the German restaurant, was he in on it? Let's just say that the restaurant probably serves a lot of herrings, red ones at that. I know the actor who played the German guy from his decades-long soap opera career, so I guess I expected his character to play a larger part. (FUN FACT, that actor is also the father of the film's director.)
I've still got plenty of NITPICK POINTS, like what if the Chinese restaurant hadn't been hiring? How did Big Nick know which stripper to talk to? And how did the crew know so much about the floor plan of the Federal Reserve? The story is so complicated that it's beyond unbelievable, and so it naturally sort of shrugged off many of the minor details, but on the upside, at least this was action-packed and therefore a whole lot of fun on most levels. There's a sequel in the works, which still counts as very good news.
The climax of the film takes place in an L.A. traffic jam, something you don't see very often in movies. At the top of the film, we're told that L.A. is the "bank robbery capital of the world", but you have to figure that it's also the traffic jam capital, so I suppose this was bound to happen. But it's a huge NP for me that the cops don't just call for back-up to arrive at the end of the jam-up, to me that would have made more sense and not put any civilians at risk. Just saying.
I know that I've seen too many bank robbery/heist films because I've started to notice the similarities in the plots. I know I've seen another film with ambitious thieves trying to rob the Federal Reserve, and it wasn't "Die Hard: With a Vengeance". I know I've also seen another film where the thieves were asked to "re-invest" their take from a small robbery to finance a larger one, but I can't recall which one that was. I'd Google "list of bank robbery films" but I think I've probably been placed on enough watch lists this week, based on my search history.
Also starring Gerard Butler (last seen in 'The Bounty Hunter"), Pablo Schreiber (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Evan Jones (last seen in "Hotel Artemis"), Cooper Andrews (last seen in "Shazam!"), Maurice Compte (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Kaiwi Lyman, Dawn Olivieri (last seen in "Bright"), Lewis Tan (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Jermaine Rivers, Mo McRae (last seen in "Wild"), Brian Van Holt (ditto), Meadow Williams, Max Holloway, Jay Dobyns, Alix Lapri, Matthew Cornwell (last seen in "Venom"), Eric Braeden (last seen in "100 Rifles"), Jordan Bridges (last seen in "Mona Lisa Smile"), Marcus LaVoi, Nate Boyer (last seen in "12 Strong"), John Lewis, Charline St. Charles, Tracey Bonner (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle").
RATING: 7 out of 10 bullet-proof vests
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