Tough guy L.A. cop Gerard Butler is bringing the heat against a crew of unstoppable bank robbers in a new trailer for the 2018 crime film Den of Thieves. London Has Fallen screenwriter Christian Gudegast makes his directorial debut on the action-packed film from STX Entertainment.


Den of Thieves chronicles the parallel stories of an elite unit of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, led by Butler’s take-no-prisoners Nick Flanagan, and a crew of super-professional robbers planning to heist the Federal Reserve Bank of downtown Los Angeles. 50 Cent, Pablo Schreiber (Mad Sweeney on American Gods) and O’Shea Jackson Jr. co-star in the crime saga described by STX Entertainment as “in the vein of Heat.”

Michael Mann’s 1995 crime classic Heat indeed comes to mind during the new trailer for Den of Thieves just debuted by STX Entertainment. If the L.A. setting didn’t bring back memories of Heat, the storyline concerning an elite crime-fighting unit led by a tough-guy cop going up against an equally formidable crew of master thieves would certainly have done it. It even looks like there’s a shoot-out styled after the now-famous gun battle between the crew and the cops in the streets of Los Angeles in Heat.


Whatever else Den of Thieves might be, it’s largely being sold here as a Gerard Butler vehicle, with the action star’s presence looming large in the trailer. After the critical and box office disaster of Geostorm, it would be helpful for the actor to bounce back with a good old-fashioned butt-kicking performance in a more traditional action movie. The trailer does feature a delicious bit of Butler badness: A perp lies on the street all shot up, and a completely remorseless Butler tells the poor guy he won’t get medical attention unless he coughs up some information. Butler’s character is clearly not a by-the-book sort of cop, but then neither was Al Pacino in Heat.


The fact that STX Entertainment is willing to own those inevitable Heat comparisons by deliberately mentioning the Michael Mann film in their official Den of Thieves synopsis is either an incredibly gutsy move or an incredibly foolhardy one. Either way, it’s unlikely that Den of Thieves comes anywhere close to matching the brilliance of Mann’s film, which is regarded as one of the true classics of the crime genre. If the movie just turns out to be an entertaining action film with Gerard Butler giving a fun (non-geeky) tough guy performance, then it will have done its job.

Here is the trailer: