Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (Christian Gudegast, 2025).
Americans love bank robbers. It’s part of our shared mythos. As the song goes, Jesse James stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and the American cinematic canon has followed his example. From James to Butch Cassidy to Bonnie & Clyde and onward, our rebel outlaws have also been all-American entrepreneurs, moving fast and breaking stuff and reaping the perilous reward. Whether lone gunmen or skilled operators, all operate by a similar creed: In America, you get yours by any means necessary.
In Christian Gudegast’s Den of Thieves (2018), it’s a gang of ex-Marines to answer this call. When their attempt to steal an armored car goes south, Ray (Pablo Schreiber) and his crew wipe out the responding officers using tactics they learned in Iraq. Dressed in black fatigues and tactical vests, they treat the parking lot of an outlying Los Angeles convenience store like an urban warzone. Where once their guns faced outward, toward America’s enemies on the imperial periphery, now those same weapons, soldiers, and tactics have been turned back around, catching the American government in the crosshairs. Sooner or later, the war always comes home.
In this (and in many, many, many other ways) Gudegast is cribbing from Michael Mann’s epic crime melodrama Heat (1995). In Mann’s conception, master thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and supercop Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) both saw combat in Vietnam, an experience that informs their parallel codes of honor and shared readiness to kill. Gudegast tailors his version of this story to the Global War on Terrorism. The Den of Thieves gang mostly served together in Iraq, and their tour abroad looms over the crime spree. Clad in surplus special ops gear, they take banks like they’re still storming enemy fortifications.
Ray’s gang have largely settled back into the rhythms of life back home, yet their heists still possess a warlike flavor. What is a heist, after all, but a military raid on civilian infrastructure? The scheme in the original Ocean’s 11 (1960) is carried out by a group of WWII veterans, each deploying the expertise they learned in the 82nd Airborne—the driver, the demolitions expert, et cetera—to their own profit. In effect, they were trained to rob Las Vegas in the European theater.
Dead Presidents (Albert and Allen Hughes, 1995).
Heist films confuse all manner of seemingly distinct categories. Secure sites become places of great instability, freighting everyday tasks—running errands, withdrawing cash—with real danger. These divisions get even blurrier when the culprits are veterans who turn the home front into a battlefield. In Dead Presidents (1995), Albert and Allen Hughes follow a group of Black and Latino boys from the Bronx to Vietnam and back, an experience marked by persistent brutality and gross neglect. Upon returning home, Anthony (Larenz Tate) finds a civilian world unchanged by his sacrifices, and unwilling to acknowledge his post-traumatic stress disorder. Of his Marine squadmates, one is now addicted to heroin, another disabled from exposure to Agent Orange; only a former battlefield psycho (Bokeem Woodbine) has been able to remake himself as preacher, and even this is unsatisfying. Abandoned by his government, rejected by his family, prodded by his criminal associates, and fired up by Black revolutionary politics, Anthony decides to put his hard-earned skills to work and hit an armored car. The heist is a disaster, and Anthony’s accomplices are all either captured or killed.
These crimes are often framed as permissible, if not essentially righteous. “We want the bank’s money, not yours,” McCauley tells the cowering civilians in Heat, a line Ray replicates nearly beat-for-beat in Den of Thieves. At his trial in Dead Presidents, Anthony bristles at being lectured by a judge, himself a former Marine, who sentences Anthony to life in prison. “All the shit I did for this motherfucking country,” he shouts, a rallying cry for a generation of American soldiers drafted to fight in a brutal, futile conflict and then left to fend for themselves in civilian life.
Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, 1985).
After the Vietnam War, American cinemas were filled with portraits of US veterans, struggling and marginalized, unable to shake their wartime traumas. Films like Coming Home (1978), Cutter’s Way (1981), and The Deer Hunter (1978) are, for the most part, anti-war stories, illustrating how wounds from unjust wars continue to fester in those who fought them. Veteran narratives like Taxi Driver explicitly explore the psychic ravages of wartime service. Even if Travis Bickle doesn’t say much about his experience in Vietnam, it’s clear that he now views many around him as targets he has the skills to eliminate.
By the 1980s, a new kind of blockbuster emerged. President Ronald Reagan, who would frequently refer to his screen performances as if they were real wartime service, called Vietnam “a noble cause” whose soldiers had been “denied permission to win.” In First Blood (1982), Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo is a 1970s-style outlaw, at war with the police force of a small American town; by the time of the jingoistic, much more outlandish First Blood Part II (1985), the Green Beret has returned to Vietnam for his own kind of fantasy-world heist, determined to free American prisoners and win the war definitively. While the central villains are sadistic cops and Vietnamese soldiers, Rambo harbors just as much hatred for the hippies who spat on him at the airport and called him a baby killer; the secondary villains of Part II are the civilian officials who abandon him in the field.
The Rambo narrative rhymed with another peddled by some returning veterans. According to these thousands of soldiers, writes the historian Kathleen Belew, “The corrupt government sent American boys to Vietnam and then denied them permission to win by limiting their use of force against a beastly, subhuman enemy.”1 Like the proto-fascist reactionaries of Weimar Germany (and like Rambo), these veterans believed that they had been “stabbed in the back” by cowardly bureaucrats and disloyal civilians. Some of them would go abroad as mercenaries, to command death squads in Central America and prop up the apartheid regime in Rhodesia. But many others, Marines and Green Berets and regular grunts, stayed in the United States to organize, train, and arm the white-power movement. They would continue at home the war they had lost abroad.
The Order (Justin Kurzel, 2024).
The white-power movement drew in many veterans and anti-communists, as Justin Kurzel dramatizes in The Order (2024), named for a violent white-supremacist group founded by Robert Jay Mathews. In 1969, Mathews was on his way to enlist when he heard a radio story about the prosecution of William Calley, an Army Lieutenant who ordered and oversaw the slaughter of at least 350 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. Outraged that a US soldier could be arrested for killing racial enemies, Mathews turned the car around, rejected military service, and entered the white-power movement. In 1983, he founded the Order, whose crime spree and partial destruction is the subject of Kurzel’s film.
As played by Nicholas Hoult, Mathews is an able man with bright blue eyes and permanent helmet hair, a figure of great passion and charisma, as well as a loyal soldier willing to die for the movement. Having surrendered his loyalty to the United States, he has pledged it to the white race. In an electrifying sequence, he delivers a speech at the 1984 Aryan Nations World Congress in Hayden Lake, Idaho, demanding that his audience of skinheads, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and assorted white racists stand up for themselves and their families, framing this as a courageous act of duty. These racist grievances form a victim narrative all their own, one in which white Americans have been betrayed by Jews and abused by inferior non-whites. Hoult never raises his voice, and he doesn’t have to: His audience already sees the proof in the fabric of their All-American lives.
Mathews and his compatriots want to violently establish a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest, first by undermining the authority of the US government, and then by waging war against it. Expressly racist and perversely utopian, the group took its name and organizational structure from The Turner Diaries, a work of neo-Nazi science fiction in which a guerilla movement of former soldiers sparks a nation- and then worldwide genocidal revolution. While Mathews chose not to serve in Vietnam, many of his associates did, and they were trained to use their military-surplus weapons according to US Army training manuals. As if they’re in an action thriller, they go on a crime spree, bombing pornography theaters, assassinating Jewish critics, and robbing banks and armored cars across the Pacific Northwest and Northern California.
The Order (Justin Kurzel, 2024).
Kurzel is a skillful director of pressurized action sequences, and he times as each heist to ticking clocks and approaching police sirens. But he also charges these scenes with a deep horror. For these men are not only out for themselves. Mathews considers his “moral crimes” to be both functional, providing cash that will fund the coming race war, and a productive end in themselves. With every successful heist and assassination, they see themselves as further undermining the illegitimate authority of a state which can neither catch nor stop them, thus bringing the United States that much closer to the threshold of race war.
The older generation of the white-power movement considered domestic terrorism as an extension of the wars they had previously fought abroad. But for the Order, race war is a way of life, and even domestic scenes become theaters of conflict. The Westward frontiersmen of prior generations fought wars of expansion and extermination to transform the Pacific Northwest into a landscape of homesteads and logging camps, forever inflecting the region with the shadow of conquest. The Order believes itself to be continuing this fight, a war where everything, even children, can become a weapon. Mathews teaches his adopted son to shoot a military surplus rifle, and reads him The Turner Diaries as a bedtime story. When it turns out his first wife cannot bear children, he takes a mistress in order to propagate the white race.
There is very often a desire to portray white supremacists as somehow outside of society, but The Order finds significant continuity between down-home Americana and extremism. The white-power movement has settled along the rural border between Washington and Idaho, a picturesque region perfect for their families and homesteads, where they can grow organic crops and hold barbecues. Kurzel fills his film with images of barns, schoolhouses, nurseries, and clapboard churches, all freely adorned with swastikas, Confederate flags, and Wolfsangels. Free Aryan men Sieg Heil over an infant girl in a form of ritual ideological baptism. Men in US Army camouflage carry M16s to protect violent separatists. Crosses burn on the golden prairie. In the world of The Order, American life and American war have become inseparable, giving new meaning to the word home front.
Mathews is eventually taken down by the FBI, represented in the film by a Korean War vet named Terry (Jude Law). Capable with a gun and comfortable in the wilderness, Terry is the sort of man Mathews would gladly pull into his ranks. Framed against the mountain wilds in one of the film’s many gorgeous location shots, he seems every bit the archetype of the western hero, the even-keeled lawman to Mathews’s brash frontiersman. But we are not in the Old West, and The Order are not carving out an intentional community on a distant frontier. Their war against American society receives an equally violent response from the government, ending in a standoff in which Mathews chooses to burn alive and become a martyr. His defeat becomes a victory. The thin blue line still holds, but it wavers in the smoke.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (Christian Gudegast, 2025).
The duality between cops and robbers in film is so pervasive a cliché as to become essentially meaningless. Both sides possess their own methods and pursue their own ends, and each follows a creed with its own rules and limitations. Mann posits Hanna and McCauley as a dialectic, opposing forces which could not exist without the other. But once the war comes home, the binary dissolves—everyone is a soldier, waging a neverending battle in which anything goes.
In Den of Thieves, Sheriff “Big Nick” O’Brien (Gerard Butler) and his Major Crimes deputies act like a domestic extension of the Special Forces. Bearded boozers who dress in Under Armour and flout the law, they regularly kidnap suspects and drag them to black sites scattered across Los Angeles—due process be damned. They seem to imagine they are occupying their own city, and once they zero in on Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), a seemingly junior member of the heist crew, they beat and harass him with enough frequency to make the other thieves suspect he’s flipped. As Nick tells Donnie: “You’re not the bad guys. We are. And we’ve got badges.” Whether Donnie survives is not their problem; they just need someone to go down for the robbery. Yet, as is revealed in a final twist, Big Nick is not quite the master of his own universe. Donnie is the heist’s real mastermind, hiring Ray’s crew to carry out the plan, and then leaving them to die while he absconds with millions in untraceable bills. Simple-minded and brutal, the cops are better equipped for urban gun battles than long-term strategy.
By the time of Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (2025), Donnie has disappeared to Europe, joining a gang of international diamond thieves who pull off their heists by dressing, ironically, as police officers. Nick’s decision to go undercover and track him down seems less professional than personal: professionally disgraced and recently divorced, the work of policing the edges of the law seems to be hollowing him out. And Donnie and the heist crew, known as the Panthers, have been spotted near the World Diamond Exchange in Nice, France; some sunshine and fresh pastries probably won’t hurt. After tracking Donnie down, he makes his demand at gunpoint: Cut me in, or else.
To get an office inside the Diamond Exchange, Donnie pretends to be “Jean-Jacques Dyallo,” a Côte D’Ivoirean eager to do business in this epicenter of French wealth. The other Panthers are Serbs who consider themselves to be victims of history, unfairly punished for the genocide committed by their government during the breakup of Yugoslavia. “It’s fucked up what we did to you guys in the ’90s,” admits a drugged Nick. “Fuck NATO!” The Panthers are out to get rich, but also to get even with a Europe that they believe has spurned and excluded them.
If Den of Thieves seems to have been drafted with Heat playing on a second monitor, Pantera more subtly infuses itself with the European setting and atmosphere of John Frankenheimer’s Ronin (1998). Stranded at the end of history, elite soldiers find themselves without a war to fight. Instead they wander, selling their skills to the highest bidder—in this case, the IRA. Yet even the Irish revolutionaries paying for their expertise are members of a radical faction, about to be made irrelevant by the peace process. Now free of the demands and promises of ideology, these world police might as well become criminals and leave the criminals to enforce the law.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (Christian Gudegast, 2025).
Pantera tells essentially two stories of subterfuge. In one, outsiders pretend to be insiders, scheming on the periphery of empire to stage a break-in at the core. However much they might enjoy their insider status, it’s only temporary, and always a cover: Once they’ve boosted the diamonds, the Panthers will return to being anonymous nobodies. Outlaws stay outlaws and can never hope to go legit.
In the other story, a cop pretends to be a thief, only to realize he’d rather become a real one. The combat and driving skills Nick used to stop Ray’s gang in the first movie are redeployed in the sequel for criminal purposes. The gang incorporates his former career into their plot, deploying it as a set of credentials which allow him to more easily access the Diamond Exchange’s vault. After all, who would suspect a cop? Where once he defended the law by breaking it, by the end of Pantera Nick has realized he prefers the reverse: The most effective criminals are those who pretend to act in the public interest.
That it turns out he actually is acting in the public interest—that, late in the film, he helps his buddies with the heist, and then turns them over to Interpol—is almost incidental. Like so many of the cops, veterans, and self-deputized warriors that suffuse the bank-robber mythos, he’s discovered that there’s one central distinction in American life: between those who want things, and those who take them. Some of them just happen to have badges.
- Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018), 23. ↩