197: Big Nick (with Jake Serwin & Ian Rhine from Pod Casty For Me)

The hosts of the left politics and film podcast Pod Casty For Me, Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine, return to Junk Filter for a supersized episode about Christian Gudegast’s Den of Thieves films, starring the new King of January movies Gerard Butler in his greatest role as debauched cop Big Nick O’Brien of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The first Den of Thieves features a cat and mouse plot where Big Nick leads his team of dirty cops against a heist crew planning to rob the Federal Reserve in LA, using their informant Donnie played by O’Shea Jackson Jr., a film that had ardent defenders including the German director Christian Petzold who raised eyebrows when he placed it on his list of the best films of the decade.

Coming seven years later, the sequel Pantera takes the story to Europe, where Big Nick tracks Donnie down in the French Riviera as he and his new European gang are planning a complex heist of the World Diamond Center, forcing his way into the crew.

We discuss the evolution of the series, how the sequel doubles down on the Dudes Rock qualities of the first film, and reveals how smart this dumb guy series actually is, with all the things it has to say about gang culture in the LA Police, toxic masculinity, and the healing powers of a summer in Europe with your boys as Den of Thieves evolves into an actual action franchise. If the first one feels like a variation on Michael Mann, the second one evokes Rififi, Ronin, Tenet, Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris and most unexpectedly Richard Linklater’s Before series.

Plus: we discovered there are two cuts of Pantera in circulation and we discuss their differences.

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“A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department” reported by Cerise Castle for Knock LA, March 2021

Final trailer for Den of Thieves (Gudegast, 2018)

First trailer for Den of Thieves 2: Pantera (Gudegast, 2025)