Crime 101 Is A Slick, But Safe Tribute To The LA-Set Heist
Chris Hemsworth is an expert jewel thief in this icy-cool thriller.
Contrary to its cheeky title, Crime 101 is not a tale about a mild-mannered professor who moonlights as a thief. Its true conceit is much more familiar — maybe to its detriment, as the feature debut from Bart Layton has lifted its story from countless better movies.
Crime 101 lifts heavily from the oeuvre of Michael Mann, particularly Heat, in setting this thriller in Los Angeles. The “101” in its title is for the 101 freeway, which our solitary jewel thief, Mike (Chris Hemsworth), uses to make clean getaways. That anyone could carve out a life of crime in a metropolis so choked by traffic is a silly concept at best, and the first of many plot holes at worst. But Layton is particularly adept at distracting us from any of it: Crime 101 lays on the cool factor with a lead foot, leaving questions of consistency in the dust. Deceptively fast-paced and cleverly slick, it demands our undivided attention. But does it know what to do with it once it has it?
If you’ve seen any glossy heist film — from Steve McQueen’s Bullitt to even Ben Affleck’s The Accountant — you already know what Mike’s about. Quietly obsessive, methodical, and gravely antisocial (fearing even casual eye contact), Mike is perpetually moving on a circular track. With no past besides a vaguely defined, destitute childhood and no real future beyond his eventual final score, he’s casually chasing the elusive “walk away money” that will set him free for good. He tells as much to Maya (Monica Barbaro), the put-upon girlfriend who exists solely to interrogate his secretive nature. “I’m not where I want to be yet,” Mike says when he tries to break things off for one last job.
His delusion is obvious to everyone but him. “I think you are,” Maya retorts — and she’s more right than she knows. There’s a sense that Mike was fated for this life of crime, or that he’s the least-worst option prowling the streets of LA. He’s got a knack for nabbing diamonds with maximum efficiency and zero casualties, making off with the goods without a paper trail or a trace of DNA evidence. Crime 101 soars when Hemsworth is alone in the driver’s seat: cinematographer Erik Wilson stokes taut vehicular tension, rigging cameras to swinging car doors and honing in on Hemsworth’s icy blue stare through rear-view mirrors. It’s not quite the post-modern answer to Bullitt, or even a contemporary to Drive, but those shocks of action set the tone for fun intrigue when Crime 101 gets back on solid ground.
Crime 101 is an amalgamation of older crime thrillers, but that’s not totally a bad thing.
If there’s any chance someone could get hurt in his exploits, Mike is quick to walk away — a noble instinct, but one that quickly ruins his rapport with his caustic handler, Money (Nick Nolte). When Mike abandons a particularly risky job, Money sends in Ormon (a bleach-blonde, beady-eyed Barry Keoghan) to suss out his next. Keoghan effortlessly slots into the archetype most have come to expect from him, that of the loose wire capable of extreme brutality. Crime 101 spurs one cat-and-mouse remix when he starts stalking Mike and his potential accomplices; the other takes shape with the introduction of Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), a down-on-his-luck detective building a profile on the 101 Thief.
Crime 101 is kind of like comfort food in that you know exactly what you’re getting. Hemsworth’s Mike is capable and conflicted; Ruffalo is disheveled yet shrewd; Keoghan is squirrely and menacing. Save maybe Halle Berry — whose insurance broker Sharon gets roped into Mike’s next heist — no one is really here to break a mold or challenge the status quo. It’s as by-the-book as a heist film can get, but when those tropes are juggled with skill, it reminds us that cliché doesn’t have to be a dirty word. Plenty of friction can be found between these myriad moving pieces. Layton is great at stoking tension too, connecting each entangled storyline with clever match cuts.
A sense of perpetual motion elevates this relatively basic story, inspired by Don Winslow’s 2020 novella of the same name, into something marginally diverting. It’s best at projecting icy cool, drifting over the City of Angels with twisty drone shots. But it’s not quite the tribute to L.A. that it wants to be, as, like Mike, it holds us at arm’s length until the very last moment. Halfhearted snapshots of Skid Row and the city’s most vulnerable hustlers give Crime 101 the sheen of a soul, but this house of cards doesn’t realize just how fragile it really is.
