Crime 101 isn't a great film, but it is a perfectly respectable one.
It can't escape the shadow of Heat, the movie it tries so hard to emulate, and I don't think it wants to. It is so content with its imitation that it lifts entire visual and music cues directly from Michael Mann's great Los Angeles crime epic. It's like making a dish you admired at a restaurant years earlier. The ingredients are the same, but the flavor is different because the cook isn't as accomplished.
The title comes from the 101 highway, which snakes through California, including the uncontrollable sprawl of Los Angeles. Alongside it, a criminal mastermind strikes boutiques with such precision only a single cop, Lou (Mark Ruffalo), believes it to be the work of a solitary man.
That man is Mike (Chris Hemsworth), a nervous bundle of energy packed into a six foot frame of rugged charisma. He's at the "one last job" phase of his life, which in cinematic terms is an invitation for bad things to happen. After a close call during a routine gig, Mike calls it quits.
Hemsworth has always struck me as an underrated talent. He's impossibly handsome and that is in itself a curse when you want to do anything interesting. To combat his looks, he helped turn Thor into a drunken buffoon and has accepted roles as despicable villains like Dementus in Furiosa. Crime 101 is far more traditional, yet Hemsworth doesn't disappoint. Even as the film wants to lean into the fantasy, he pushes back with a vulnerable and troubled performance that is far more interesting than the plot allows.
Elsewhere, Sharon (Halle Berry), struggles to make sense of a dead end career in high-value insurance. Money (Nick Nolte), a shady broker of stolen goods, hires Ormon (Barry Keoghan) to tail Mike after his abrupt change of heart. Meanwhile, the beautiful Maya (Monica Barbaro) falls for our hunky Australian burglar after a chance encounter on the road.
The characters are archetypes and their plotlines predictable. But it also happens that the cast is so good they make the mundane material sing nonetheless. Barbaro, for example, is superb at saying things without resorting to language. There are scenes that would work better without a line of dialog because she has told us everything necessary in a glance and hidden smile.
Ruffalo and Berry are equally strong at playing professionals cast aside by a system interested only in the superficial. I don't buy the idea that they're destined to become lovers, as the film would imply, but everything else about them feels honest. It takes a skilled actor to bring a thin character to life. Both Ruffalo and Berry slip into the roles as if these people had walked in off the street.
Then there's Keoghan, who is a tremendous talent at playing unlovable losers. He finds their rotten core and brings out a fully fleshed human when others would lean into caricature. I don't like most of the people he plays, but I can't help but feel I've met some of them in real life.
Crime 101 requires all this talent to elevate the script, which is passable in its best moments and upsettingly dull in others. Writer/director Bart Layton adapts the story from Don Winslow's novella of the same name, though the result feels strangely unwieldly. Put it next to Train Dreams, also a novella adaptation, and you can only admire how focused the latter is by comparison.
There's a fine line between a mosaic and convoluted. Crime 101 tiptoes between the two, but ultimately comes down on the lesser side. Characters disappear as if they were never there with little effect on the plot. The soundtrack and cinematography tell us we're watching a suspenseful sequence, yet there is no tension. It's all very capable and entertaining, but it doesn't get the heart racing.
But it is mostly handsomely produced and it's never truly boring. With this amount of talent in front and behind the camera, it would be far more impressive if the end result didn't work. So it's frustrating to watch how Layton frames Hemsworth before an glass wall in blue light at dusk just as Mann did with De Niro. It meant something in Heat. Here it only reflects our memory of a better film.
When a film comes out with a title like Crime 101, you always hope it turns out good. While 101 here refers to the highway, it's also shorthand for the very basics of something. A 101 class is the introduction to a subject. It opens a film to all kinds of easy jokes, like: "Boy, they sure forgot pacing 101."
Happily, Crime 101 is not that kind of film. It is just fine, which is as much of a compliment as it isn't. It has the basics down to science, everything else is a little loose. Yet there are worse Heat imitations to watch, and that's not nothing.
