Ray Merrimen heads a crew of crooks who have successfully carried out multiple bank robberies in Los Angeles. Nick O'Brien heads a group of fairly wild cops who know who they are after, but haven't been able to catch them yet. Merrimen's crew have a big caper set up, O'Brien's squad has a man on the inside, and the scene is set for a cat and mouse crime caper movie.

The caper is good - a little over-complex, but pleasingly constructive. And the ultimate scenes bring a smile to the face. Now to look at what is not so good.

This film runs for 2 hours and 20 minutes, and feels every minute of it. Butler's character is deeply unpleasant (nothing wrong with an anti-hero as such, however...) to the extent that you don't want to spend time in his company, nor do you want him to triumph despite the fact that he is nominally a goodie. There is great emphasis on the drama of his domestic situation: this is plot irrelevant, goes nowhere, is never resolved, and has no impact on his mood or actions. O'Brien and Merrimen have a weird kind of one-upmanship jockeying for position going on: this doesn't seem to have any direct cause or effect on anything. And the final action sequence goes on for rather too long.

Like the film, in fact.

DEN OF THIEVES is a surprisingly decent bank heist thriller, a new addition to a genre that's been going since the 1950s. I enjoy the oldies and I enjoy the new ones too, and this one doesn't disappoint. After a slightly awkward opening that nonetheless features a top action scene, we move into a slow burning plot that involves the usual parallels between heroes and villains. HEAT is an obvious inspiration here and DEN OF THIEVES suffers a little from the comparison; a way overlong running time doesn't help much either. What I did like was that the characters are more fleshed out than usual for the genre, with Gerard Butler's deadbeat county sheriff a particular blessing. Inevitably the heist itself is the highlight and it's an extended, extensive moment, superbly directed to wring every drop of tension from the premise. The ending offers spectacular and gritty action, plus a twist that sets up the forthcoming sequel. I loved it.

L.A. is the capital of bank robberies. A heavily armed crew led by Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber) steals an armored truck. Police Detective Nick O'Brien leads the Major Crimes unit in charge of the investigation. He is perplexed that the truck is reported to be empty. The squad kidnaps suspect Donnie Wilson (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) who reveals that he was recruited by the crew to be their driver.

Everybody is playing hard-body acting while showing off their muscles and guns. It tries to be Heat but this is a B-movie version. Nick's home difficulties have too much prominence and the movie spends too much time on it. The movie is over two hours long and it doesn't need that. This should be a shorter hard-nosed action thriller. It's got enough gun action. It's got plenty of hard-body posing and grunt acting. It's got a fair bank robbery caper. It's just too long.