Scumbag Elegy

The Scuzzy Sadness of Den of Thieves

“I told you.” 

These are the final words of Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber) as he bleeds out on the streets of Los Angeles. Christian Gudegast’s crime epic Den of Thieves’ parallels to parallels had been obvious from minute one; they solidify across the film, concluding with Merrimen’s dying breaths echoing De Niro’s Neil McCauley. It’s easy to write Gudegast off as a rip-off artist, and many did when it was released in 2018. Along with Mann’s crime masterpiece, he draws from a litany of genre classics, notably Inside Man and The Usual Suspects. On its face, Den of Thieves is nothing more than parts of “better,” perhaps more “sophisticated” films. Dig beneath the disgusting veneer of sweat, grime, and Monster energy, however, and you’ll find that it’s far more deserving of being their tremendously bleak equal.

Like Heat, Den of Thieves follows a gang of bank robbers and a determined detective hot on their trail. Sweeping in and out of their lives across a sprawling two and a half hours, Merrimen and his crew play the proverbial mouse to “Big” Nick O’Brien’s (Gerard Butler) cat. We see every intricacy of Merrimen’s heist plans coexisting alongside Big Nick chasing leads and squeezing informants. Its gorgeous, enveloping photography from Terry Stacey laces itself around you, lulling you into its world of violence, as should all great crime films. There’s something not quite right here, however. It’s a feeling that vibrates beneath Cliff Martinez’s numbing, ambient score. It lurks within the vitriol of these meathead brutes barking at one another. Where Mann finds swooning romanticism in doing “the job,” as well as honor in the men who do it, Den of Thieves finds only hollow, broken sadness.

Bleary-eyed, puffy, and perpetually sweaty, Gerard Butler locates this sadness better than anyone. Introduced by Everlast’s eternal rap-rock ballad “What It’s Like,” Butler’s Big Nick is a hulking, primo slice of dirtbag beef. As he stumbles home after another late night, stinking of a “stripper” (as his wife spits at him), it’s almost shocking to see Butler looking like this. It’s easy to forget, now that he’s made a career playing the world’s most divorced man, but Butler used to be something of a heartthrob. Early stints in romcoms, a catastrophic yet dashing turn as The Phantom, shredded out of his mind in 300, Butler was about as ideal a leading man as you could get. Tall, handsome, willing to sing and make himself look silly, it always felt like his ceiling was a charming yet bland centerpiece for date night fare. Sure, he’d found an action franchise in the Has Fallen series, but again, he wasn’t doing much to set himself apart. Solid, serviceable work meant to evaporate from the mind. In Den of Thieves, Butler not only finds his lane, but he transcends into the darkest possible iteration of the dirtbag we’ve come to know.  

“You’re not the bad guys. We are,” says Big Nick to Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) after kidnapping and interrogating him. Donnie, having been seen with Merrimen, had woken up in a hotel room to Big Nick and his Sheriff’s department crew partying with sex workers, beer bottles strewn everywhere. Grossly overstepping their power is something we see the police do in every crime movie, but here it doesn’t feel like a simple ‘part of the job.’ For once, owing in large part to Butler’s swaggering, sweaty menace, it’s disturbing. If these guys wanted to, they could disappear Donnie, and who would really know? That they so effortlessly snatched him off the street is bad enough, made worse to the modern viewer only by the parallel to the real-life sudden arrests we saw captured on film all throughout the summer of 2020. Big Nick is entertaining, sure, but neither the film nor Butler ever lets you forget that this man is a throbbing mass of hate, sadness, and failure. No moment makes this more apparent than when he crashes a dinner at his in-laws to sign his divorce papers. Already three sheets to the wind, Big Nick arrives to find his wife with her new man and dresses her down, along with her entire family. After embarrassing himself, his wife, and her family, his soon-to-be ex-brother-in-law tries to escort him to the door, and our hero sarcastically barks, “what are you gonna do? Call the cops?”

Compare Big Nick to Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna in Heat. Sure, there’s a deep sadness in Hanna’s inability to put his family over his job, but Hanna’s never a scumbag. When he catches his wife cheating, he doesn’t lash out in the way you’d expect. There’s almost an understanding beneath Hanna’s anger. A “yeah, I get it” response to the fact that his wife is so fed up with the late nights and broken promises. Big Nick’s failings, on the other hand, are only apparent to us. He doesn’t seem to get that he’s a monster. He treats women like objects because, in his mind, his badge makes him a hero. He can torture anyone and everyone because he’s perpetually above the law. The fact that he can’t see that is horrific. His life disintegrates before his very eyes because of “the job.” Unlike Mann’s romantic notions about guys who just won’t quit, Gudegast unearths something so broken and somehow so mundane. Big Nick is a dime a dozen in a country full of meathead, thug cops. You can aspire to Vincent Hanna because there’s an honor to him. Even if you don’t believe in the badge or the institution, you can relate to the inability to let go of what means most to you. The badge means nothing to Big Nick beyond being a free pass to whatever he wants and whoever he wants. His late nights turning to red-eyed mornings aren’t spent in the office trying to connect one thread to another, but in bars gulping down poison so he can briefly disassociate from his pathetic reality.

On the other side of the aisle, Ray Merrimen’s existence is just as hollow, if not more so. Vague details are given about his military background, putting him in concert with other recent crime films like Ambulance and Wrath of Man. Unlike those films that put a clear emphasis on how we’ve abandoned the men and women who fought in our endless War on Terror, Ray’s background is an afterthought. You discern that he's a forgotten man whose only recourse is crime, but like Big Nick’s brutality, there’s nothing special about his penchant for holding up armored cars. This point is made explicit right from the jump as Den of Thieves opens with a title card telling us that LA is the “bank robbery capital of the world.” Ray isn’t some avenging hero, a former goon for the US government taking back his agency. No, Ray’s just another guy with a gun trying to eke out a living in a city full of men who look and act exactly like him. Gone is the code that De Niro’s McCauley lives by, always protecting his men. When Ray’s men are gunned down, he barely glances back. It is what it is. When McCauley finds love, you believe it. Even when he makes the fatal mistake of tying up that one loose end, you never doubt his commitment to Eady. Ray’s emotional attachment is so nonexistent that the one glimpse we’re given of his love life is when he returns home to the aftermath of having pimped his girlfriend out to Big Nick solely to throw him off their scent. She’s nothing but a pawn in this sorry excuse’s bid to get rich. Never is Ray’s insignificance made more brutally clear than in the film’s twist ending. Long after he’s bled out on the asphalt, meeting the end of Big Nick’s gun, it’s revealed that Donnie was the mastermind all along. Donnie, the wimp kidnapped by Bick Nick, simply for having been seen talking with Ray. Ray was just some meathead with half a brain who could navigate the danger, and he paid for it with his life. Donnie, rich, back home in England, and already eying his next prize (a diamond exchange across the street from the bar where he works), couldn’t care less. 

Den of Thieves was and is treated as Heat’s younger, dumber brother. In many ways, it’s hard to dispute. Sure, the action is cold, calculating, and pulsating, and there’s a certain charm to watching these muscle-bound dummies annihilate one another. The nuance and beauty of Mann’s masterpiece are traded for a seething mass of men indistinguishable from the guys populating a shitty bar on a Friday night. But therein lies the heartbreak. When Hanna finally guns down McCauley, it’s in a wide open airfield, the world McCauley giving up as he bleeds out represented by the vast possibilities out there in the distance. Ray, however, meets his end in a claustrophobic, grimy street covered in graffiti and garbage, the world smothering him as if to say, “This guy didn’t matter. None of what he did matters.” These are anonymous dirtbags, both cops and robbers, whose lives and misdeeds exist in a void of violence, pain and ultimately, death. Gudagast discards any notion of romance or aspiration and in turn gives us one of the most clear-headed depictions of the interchangeable meaningless of both sides of the law. “Good” and “evil” are just labels. All these guys want is to operate above and beyond mortals like us and enrich themselves while doing so. Some of them hide behind a badge to do it.

-Brandon Streussnig