Review: DEN OF THIEVES

Painting With Bullets: 
An Overblown Cops 'N' Robbers Tale 
With Fake Overgrown Macho Guys

ZERO stars

Mini Review:

PUHLEEZ! This is such an obviously bad film, you see an aerial shot of an armored truck traveling on a deserted road at 5.41 am and the voice-over begins, 'Most bank robberies are done here than anywhere else in the United States,' before you can sigh into your coffee, people are shot (unnecessary machine gun fire), cops arrive, they are shot at and the robbers get away with the truck. The cops now investigate and robbers get more daring. It is a never-ending bullet fest. Loud and bad.

Main Review:

Where is the Gerard Butler of 'P.S. I Love You' or 'The Ugly Truth' or even '300'? This Gerard Butler looks like what happened to Steven Seagal. Worse, because it's not enough that he's a 'badass cop' he's still being made to 'act'. He gets to cry, stalk his daughters at school and drink milk out of the carton even though he smells like a 'whore'. He gets to react when served with divorce papers, he gets to act the jealous ex-husband when he shows up at a small dinner party where his wife looks like she's with a 'guy'. Ugh! These are part that could be easily deleted and the film would still work. 

After all, this is a cops catching robbers movies, and no other character is given any family background. It's a muscle fest, dudes! There's no need to show family. Unless they're going to blow up and get the hero madder and badder. The cops have tattoos and guns and swagger (which I suspect comes because they wear such tight jeans!) and they have machine guns too, and they forget the audience has seen magazines and practically know how to load the magazines without ever having seen a gun irl. 

This film is that predictable. 

The bad guys want money so bad, they are willing to rob the Federal Reserve for something like 30 million dollars that no body will miss. Seriously, if you swallow that, you will also buy into security that is sometimes the toughest, and sometimes so stupid, a delivery guy goes up to the canteen to deliver food. Corporate houses in India don't let food delivery chaps enter 'sacred' office space. And we are to believe that the employees of the Federal Reserve let anyone walk in with food delivery?

This film is that dumb.

And watching a botoxed, beefed up to ugly hero slur through his role where only bad guys and a few good guys get killed in a shootout in a traffic jam, all civilians escape unhurt...And the shootout is with machine guns, nothing less.

Gerard Butler gets beefier by the minute and is made to do his stunts. If someone that large is made to do parkour, there are shots that look really, really awkward. And the plot is so thin it seems nonexistent (then you read how the filmmakers worked on it for more than ten years, you wish they had dumped this ridiculous bullet riddled plot into Direct To Home thang.

The only concession, the villain Pablo Shrieber looks good. 

Why is Hollywood still making such trash?

I think this and then see the ad in the Times Of India for a brand of sunglasses.

Facepalm.