Christian Gudegast, writer of A Man Apart and London Has Fallen, makes his directorial debut with Den of Thieves, and it's everything he's been building toward as a creator of generic, testosterone-driven crime dramas. Gerard Butler stars as hungover L.A. cop Nick Flanagan, whose crew finds a ring of bank robbers, headed by Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber), who may be responsible for a string of unsolved "highly sophisticated, well-executed heists." They lean on Merrimen's associate, ex-con bartender Donnie (O'Shea Jackson Jr.), to infiltrate the group before they hit their next target: the L.A branch of the Federal Reserve. This is fine material for a heist movie, and Den of Thieves eventually becomes a reasonably entertaining one. But it's weighed down by delusions of gravity, spending too much time on Nick's personal life (his wife is leaving him, of course) and camaraderie among the crooks (who also include 50 Cent). When we get to the day of the heist, the movie's been on for 70 minutes ... and it's only half-over. by Eric D. Snider