The regular truth of the matter is that box office success determines how the media cookie crumbles. Indeed, you can tap into profound emotional truths, land yourself a lead who puts on the performance of a lifetime, and make it through your runtime with minimal plot holes, but first priority will always go to the filmmakers who get more butts in seats, even if they only make loud slop. 86p4i

This is precisely why Den of Thieves 2: Pantera — due in theaters on Jan. 10 — exists; because 2018’s Den of Thieves managed to snag $80.5 million at the box office on a $30 million budget in spite of its artistic dearth. The worst part? Viewers at home still haven’t wised up to its stench all these years later.

Per FlixPatrol, Den of Thieves has cemented itself as the third most watched film on the United States’ Max charts at the time of writing, falling short of a first-place Juror #2, the latest and perhaps last film from Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood, which was hardly given any chance in theaters despite being one of the best films of 2024.

Den of Thieves stars dad-movie superstar Gerard Butler as Nick O’Brien, an alcoholic officer with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department who’s dead set on taking down a gang of thieves led by Ray Merrimen (Pablo Schreiber), an ex-Marine whose crew is planning a heist on the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Los Angeles. Bouncing between them is Donnie (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), a member of Merrimen’s crew that Nick has the drop on.

The two biggest faults of Den of Thieves is how it doubles down on toxic impulses that shouldn’t be affirmed, and doesn’t seem understand what it’s doing half the time. The film wastes a fair chunk of its frankly unacceptable length (two hours and 20 minutes) exploring the lives of characters that have little to no weight in the film’s story, while the story itself is nothing more than complex info drops about the incoming heist’s logistics.

In others words, Den of Thieves exists to show off how well director-writer Christian Gudegast can intellectualize the ins and outs of the Federal Reserve Bank, all while the characters crack tasteless jokes and abuse each other, only for the film to try and win back our sympathies by showing us Nick’s daughters, who also have nothing to do with the story.

It’s shockingly inept filmmaking, but for some reason, audiences love a bunch of men who appeal to some perverted power fantasy that always stems from a place of hurt rather than a place of healing. And really, pandering to that crowd might be the film’s worst sin. In a world where art has always been one of our greatest tools in fostering empathic literacy, is it not a sickening tragedy when a film insists upon these maladaptive, mean-spirited vices as facts of life to be proudly owned?

If you want to see a truly beautiful example of markedly masculine filmmaking, queue up The Iron Claw, also on Max, and let Sean Durkin paint you a portrait of brotherly love that will leave you sobbing.

Here’s the thing about modern moviegoing: everyone likes to complain that no good movies are being made anymore, when in reality fantastic films come out every other day that simply require a bit of effort to access.

But it’s still nevertheless depressing that these fantastic films aren’t more broadly embraced by movie theaters, and end up buried for committing no more heinous a crime than not featuring the Minions or satisfying the nostalgic ego of its audiences. Juror #2 was found guilty of these charges by the Warner Bros. overlords, and Max viewers are now picking up the forced slack in hopes of giving Clint Eastwood’s potential swansong the attention it deserves.

Per FlixPatrol, Juror #2 continues to enjoy itself at the top of the United States’ Max film charts at the time of writing, utilizing its robust drama to keep the likes of a second-place Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and a third-place Joker: Folie à Deux at bay.

Directed and produced by Clint Eastwood, Juror #2 stars Nicholas Hoult as Justin Kemp, a man who regrettably gets called up for jury duty in the middle of his wife’s high-risk pregnancy. The case is one of James Sythe, who’s on trial for the alleged murder of his girlfriend Kendall Carter after a none-too-pleasant fight at a local bar. This bar, being the one that Justin drove home from the night of the murder, and the night of that murder being one where Justin accidentally hit a deer that might not have been a deer. Quel scandale!

To speak of Juror #2 is to accept the fact that you will never unpack it in full. There’s nothing glamorous or indulgent about Eastwood’s direction; every decision he makes and every performance he gets out of his top-notch cast is entirely in service to the most sobering possible reflection on the American justice system.

And within that, the nonagenarian screen legend strikes a devastatingly humanist chord with all the dilemmas faced by the likes of Justin, his peers, his superiors, and the lives that are in his hands. The film ostensibly declares that justice isn’t real, but also more accurately suggests that justice is often so ugly that calling it as such fills us with existential dread. We are all, after all, just trying to do the right thing while staving off our own fundamentally restless conscience, as well as that of a public who must consume tragedy and its gerrymandered resolution to distract from their own emptiness.

To put it simply, Juror #2 is not an easy watch, and unfortunately, easy watches are what’s “in” right now. Indeed, it’s perhaps no wonder that Eastwood’s latest was unceremoniously kicked to the curb when we’re living in the advent of streaming films designed to be understood while you’re looking at your phone. And yet, Eastwood seems to believe that we can all rise to the occasion, and that counts for something.