CylonVIP

5

After the 2014 Godzilla film, people demanded a dumb monster movie.
The result is something that joins the ranks of Jurassic World 2, Pacific Rim 2 or Rampage.
Happy now?

Pro's:
- Creature design/VFX.
- The set up for the 3 main human characters (the idea that drives them).

Con's:
- Massively overblown (especially at the end).
- Too much exposition and way too plot driven. Emphasizing the plot is never a good idea when you make a film like this.
- The dialogue in this is awful, and does the actors no favours.
- The characters are hollow shells, and constantly act in unnatural ways. Especially what they did with Vera Farmiga's character felt lazy and not earned.
- It overuses the orange and teal look to a degree where Zack Snyder would be jealous of it.
- If you thought the final season of GoT had a lot of deus ex machina and 'plot armour' moments, just know that you've seen nothing yet.
- The action scenes in this are incoherent and underlit, and therefore hard to follow.

I find it funny that whenever we get one of these, the take away for most always seems to be: too much focus on the humans, not enough on the monsters!
Well, here's the thing: you can't really develop characters like Godzilla or King Kong, so watching them for 2 hours walk through buildings and punching things is going to get dull very fast.
Therefore, you need the human focus.
You know which director knows this? Steven Spielberg.
You know which movie knows this? Jurassic Park.
So instead of demanding more shallow elements for the next one, let's maybe ask for the filmmakers to develop the characters for once, and stop focussing on a plot we've seen hundreds of times at this point.

2.5/10

Den of Thieves is like the male reproductive organ: exciting at each end but long and boring in the middle.

It's a trap most films of this genre fall into. An action scene at the beginning to grab our attention and one at the end for a climax, but in the middle nothing but cliches. And with the European version clocking in at TWO HOURS AND TWENTY MINUTES (WTF!?) there's a lot of room for cliches.

The renegade police squad as bent as the criminal gang they're pursuing is a cliche we've come to expect, but too much time is wasted demonstrating how '3-dimensional' and 'fleshed out' these men are. To be sure, there's enough beefcake here to choke the deepest of throats (Gerard Butler, Pablo Schreiber and 50 Cent are so cut their shirts keep falling off), so they're 3D and fleshed out all right, but family men? We're meant to believe they consider family important, yet the only proof of that we're given is they feel guilty every time they treat their families like shite.

It's a shame, really. Christian Gudegast does a competent job directing the action and suspense, but he should've stuck to that rather than drawing so heavily on the source material (a 1992 non-fiction book by Pulitzer Prize winning author James B. Stewart).

No, Den of Thieves is not the epic cops and robbers film it thinks it is. It's simply a giant fake boob: over-inflated, self-aggrandizing and not as unique as it thinks it is.