Why Den Of Thieves Failed Despite Ripping Off A Perfect Movie

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Director Christian Gudegast's Den of Thieves tried to emulate the perfect heist movie in 2018 with its release, but the movie unfortunately still failed in that regard. 300's Gerard Butler led the explosive crime thriller with actors like Straight Outta Compton's O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Curtis «50 Cent» Jackson beside him. While Den of Thieves pillaged enough from its genre predecessors to warrant an upcoming sequel, the film still failed in very important ways.

Den of Thieves' surprising performance at the box office made that aforementioned sequel inevitable. That doesn't mean that the first film was free of fault, however. Critics were quick to point out that the Gerard Butler thriller fell short of the same films to which Den of Thieves so obviously paid homage, and the critical consensus was hard to refute. Thieves ripped off one film so poorly that some of those Den of Thieves reviews were more brutal than critical, and that ripped-off film was 1995's Heat.

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Despite lifting entire characters and scenes from Heat, Den of Thieves still missed the mark by failing to understand what originally made Heat the perfect heist film. There are entire sequences in Den of Thieves where it's clear that the script's only goal was to mimic iconic moments from Michael Mann's classic. Unfortunately for Thieves, and despite the talents of the film's leading man, Gerard Butler's «Big» Nick O'Brien was a pale imitator of Al Pacino's Vincent Hanna. Heat was successful because it found a heartfelt balance between its depictions of criminals and the police in pursuit of them. Hanna was the central lieutenant in this conflict, altruistic but tragically