When it first released in 2018, Christian Gudegast’s Den of Thieves was soundly rejected as a poor-man’s knockoff of Heat—Michael Mann with a few flickers of rust peeking through the paint. But for a lot of us, there’s a kind of dirtbag charm to that label, especially in its cops-and-robbers tale of a sweaty, divorcing LA sheriff (Gerard Butler’s “Big Nick” O’Brien) on the trail of a cabal of meathead military vets turned bank robbers (led by Pablo Schreiber). But—and spoilers for the first Den of Thieves—the film’s closing minutes revealed that Nick’s eye should have been turned to Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), who spends the bulk of the runtime as Nick’s unwitting mole before turning out to have been the mastermind all along, Keyser Soze-style. It’s a delightfully goofy twist, one that elevates Gudegast’s film into something akin to meatball masterpiece.

Seven years later, Gudegast returns to this world of amoral cops and grimy robbers with Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, but ups the budget and the locale to something a bit classier, moving from the greasy hell of Los Angeles to the glamour of southern France. You see, after making away with his misbegotten wares, Donnie has already moved on to his next score, and the one after that: The film’s opening minutes meticulously chart a well-planned extraction of diamonds from an airplane in an Antwerp airport, featuring fake cop cars dutifully driving out of a smuggled shipping container and back out again. That’s Donnie and his crew, making away with millions in diamonds that he now has to fence. But that move seems just to be the tee-up to his biggest score yet: The World Diamond Centre in Nice, France. (The real Centre is in Antwerp, where the astonishing real heist Pantera is based on took place in 2003.)

Where Donnie is living his best Arsène Lupin life in France, all linen suits and designer sunglasses, Big Nick is, if you’ll believe it, in an even deeper hole than before. When we first see him, he’s pissing in a courthouse urinal, divorce papers clenched between his teeth. He’s so angry, he tears the hand dryer off the wall. He’s losing his kids, he’s been fired from the LASD, and to add more piss to the cereal, the Federal Reserve doesn’t even believe Donnie stole from them (the perfect crime, you see). Even more than the first film, Butler plays him with this bedraggled pathos, a pathetic brute who just doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. He’s sweaty, desperate, and sad, which is why he’s so obsessed with tracking Donnie down.

But he gets his chance when he gets a tip that Donnie has made his way to France, and he grabs a spot on Task Force Pantera, a group dedicated to tracking down the “Panthers,” an elite cadre of jewelry thieves who’ve been pulling off flawless heists (and whom Donnie has partnered with). But here’s the kicker: once he finally pins down Donnie in a hotel room, he comes not with handcuffs, but with a proposition: Join forces. “You’re not a killer. I am,” Nick tells him; he’s fed up playing by the rules. He wants in. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

From there, Pantera makes up for a shaky first act (full of more location cards and nondescript bearded European brutes wearing gold chains than you could imagine) as it blossoms into something altogether more charming and optimistic for its sprawling two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Where the first Thieves was scumbag Heat, this is Ronin by way of the fourth Fast & Furious; glamorous European locales, a cop-and-robber bromance that gives way to surprisingly emotional notes, and thrilling car chases through the winding roads of southern France. The script, now solely written by Gudegast, is a bit overcomplicated–you’ll have to juggle a host of competing interests for the diamonds, including an Italian mafia don whose treasured pink diamond Donnie unknowingly fleeced–but it luckily mostly serves as window dressing for the Ocean’s-esque hijinks that ensue.

The glue that holds this thing together is Butler and Jackson, who carry their own frequency in their individual threads but harmonize wonderfully once fate thrusts them together. They’re two broken men finding camaraderie in each other’s flaws; Donnie, strangely, might just be the key to healing Nick’s pain by giving him purpose. Their dynamic grows into something akin to a winsome buddy action comedy, of the stripe that Jackson’s own dad probably starred in a dozen times in the 2000s. Together, they fight, they party, they race off in e-scooters, they eat schwarma and have heart-to-hearts in the dead of night. Amongst all the bearded machismo, these are moments of welcome vulnerability that cement these guys’ curious draw toward each other. “You and me, we’re part of this symbiosis,” Nick tells Donnie. Each of them can’t exist without the other. Pantera acknowledges this and treats this symbiosis with utmost sincerity, and it becomes something oddly sweet off the back of Den of Thieves‘ nihilism.

For all his Mann-erisms, Gudegast’s aping of the thriller, plot, and action beats of films like Heat seems to serve him well, and Pantera proves an even more capable approximation of that high-wire act than the first. It helps, of course, that the intrigue is paired from a bloated ensemble to almost purely focusing on Butler, Jackson, and the cabal of competing Europeans vying for their lives and their prizes. (Evin Ahmad makes an impression as Jovanna, the Panthers’ leader, who navigates a fragile trust with Donnie and a budding sexual tension with Nick but otherwise mostly plays support.) But all the planning and bonding and double-crossing leads to a high-wire act of a heist that would make the greats proud: It’s a masterwork of silent maneuvering through surveillance camera gaps, deployment of neat gadgets like reflective camera shields, and skillful navigation of the usual unexpected wrinkles. (Leading, of course, to a hell of a car chase along the winding roads of southern France, deployed with electric Porsches, if you’ll believe it.)

It’s hardly high cinema–Butler remains the ugly American chomping on food and grunting his way from one situation to another, and the product placement is Out of Control. But there’s a scummy charm to Pantera that feels like the next level up from Gudegast’s first; where that was a grim, nihilistic ode to LA misery, he seems to have let his affection for his surviving characters bleed into the script. Here, in the gorgeous European locales of Pantera, Big Nick and Donnie find hope, joy, purpose, and maybe even a bit of a future. And that’s strangely gratifying.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is currently playing in theaters.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera Trailer: