“Big Nick” O’Brien directs an anti-crime team in Los Angeles, the world capital of cinema and bank robberies. A more bloody robbery than the others, policemen shot down to steal an empty armored truck, took his sleep away. Planted by his wife, who no longer tolerates his lifestyle, O’Brien throws himself headlong into his work. With a handful of men he investigates crime and meets Donnie, manager of a pub and key to access the mystery. In a race against time, O’Brien must contend with a bad professional who decided to storm the Federal Reserve Bank, a government palace considered impenetrable, to steal thirty million dollars withdrawn from circulation and destined for pulp. But O’Brien still does not know.
Inspired without complexes to the aist movie by Michael Mann (Heat – The challenge), In the den of wolves vaguely traces the intrigue and reproduces the crackling shootings, the gunfight bottled in highway traffic and the blows on the cars’ cars.
With the power of fire, however, the first work of Christian Gudegast has another trump card. Without being revolutionary, it benefits from an above-average screenplay and accurate staging, a rare commodity in the genre. Urban thriller who then looks only to himself, In the den of the wolves he promises what he maintains: adrenaline and impetuous virility. Erupting of a machismo of another era, the film is crossed by the excesses of borderline characters inebriated by their own amorality, proud representatives of a masculinity soaking in testosterone. Visibly aware of his influences but also of the expectations that tickles, Christian Gudegast check all the boxes that had been fixed and carries out the classic scheme of the policeman on the verge of a nervous breakdown engaged in the game ‘of the cat and the mouse’ with a bandit ‘equipped’ and always one step ahead.
In the end there will only be one “at the bottom of a film that has (also) the good taste of getting rid of existential considerations. Within an aseptic American film landscape where the notion of action film was expropriated by Marvel’s tights in blockbusters, In the den of wolves it can legitimize to boast the legacy of the vintage B series and spend three orgasmic names: Gerard Butler, 50 Cent and O ‘ Shea Jackson Jr.