CHRIS HEMSWORTH IN CRIME 101 C+ over B-This is a movie about a chain of lone-wolf jewel thefts in Los Angeles and the people who are in different ways involved in them. "101" has a dual meaning: the thefts are so skillful they are a course in how to do it; they're also linked by all occurring near California's Highway 101. This is a big, loud, exciting, almost continually tense and somewhat violent movie, though the thefts are achieved, notably, without violence. It has an exciting finale. It's got a good cast. But it's not a great movie. This is for several reasons. It does not tell its story clearly. For being about a meticulous thief, it comes off as surprisingly chaotic. There are actually some plot points that get dropped. And that way much of the pleasure gets lost.
The London-born filmmaker Bart Layton is known for directing and producing true-crime hybrid documentaries such as
The Imposter (2012) and
American Animals (2018), also for a 2007 TV series "Locked-Up Abroad," about people who got caught up in crimes and arrests and did time in rough foreign jails. There is something of the latter in
Crime 101, because several "straight" folks get caught up in crime.
Crime 101 has the marks of an early-in-the year release: there's fun here, but things aren't all quite right. It's got name actors in it. Chris Hemsworth plays a suave jewel thief; but as one critic mentions, if you want to see a good movie about jewel thievery, why not just watch the classic
Rififi, from 1955? Mark Ruffalo is here as a rumpled cop whose unified theory of the jewel thefts his bosses don't buy (they'd like to rack up more arrests). Ruffalo has played many cops, including one in
Zodiac and, more to the point, one in Mann’s
Collateral who has a theory his colleagues don't buy. There's also Halle Berry, Jennifer Jason Leigh (underused), Barry Keoghan (too crudely used), Nick Nolte (too briefly used), and Monica Barbero, who convincingly impersonated Joan Baez in
A Complete Unknown. Her role here as the thief's girlfriend corresponds to Amy Brenneman's in
Heat. The four main cast members have all been in superhero movies and it's been suggested they are trying to atone for their sins here, because this is, relatively speaking, a "human" film. There could be more depth in character portrayal for sure, but these are people we're watching, perhaps except for the outsider criminal who comes in after the master thief has done the heist, and noisily and violently steals it from him. This character, played by Barry Keoghan, is the weak point of the action. His character isn't interesting enough or violent enough. He is not explored.
One thing that is interesting is - even though it's not handled elegantly - the way different stories are followed and, sometimes, interwoven. Sharon is a fancy insurance sales person and claims adjuster played by Halle Berry whose inability to move up the employment ladder to the level of partner as she should due to her superior's ageist and sexist (and perhaps racist) bias is carefully explored. She also runs into one of the bad guys and they start dating. There is the cop (Ruffalo) who's treated as a dummy and even a liability for his partner though he has the solution to the crime. All this and more would be extremely interesting in a better written and better edited film.
There is a lot of dialogue that Layton, working with Don Winslow from a novella by Winslow, have added on and one has the feeling they're going for some of the inspired use of profanity Tarantino is so good at but, of course, they're not Tarantino and the talk isn't particularly arresting. Greater brevity could have meant greater wit.
But the worst thing that is wrong with
Crime 101 is that it has been found by numerous critics to be almost dumbfoundingly indebted to Michael Mann's 1995
Heat.. And if that were not enough, a lot of its visuals, especially the night aerial shots of the city, are lifted from Mann's
Collateral, where, however, they are sharper and more beautiful.
Some may like the up-to-date hyperintensity of the filmmaking here. Everything is shaky-cam and super up-close. This produces excitement. So does the loud and propulsive score by multiple hands but primarily by Blanck Mass, the electronic solo project of British composer and producer Benjamin John Power, which is effective, if overbearing. But what is achieved in excitement is lost at times in the ability to observe clearly what is going on. Crime films are a matter of detail, and the audience needs to be able to appreciate the specifics and above all, the timing and the control of nerves under pressure. As has often been pointed out, the dazzling jewel theft sequence in
Rififi, the most memorable in the history of movies, runs for half an hour with not a word spoken and not a note of music.
Motivational talks and yoga and a phone that shows a character she has not gotten a good nights sleep are running themes in this film. Perhaps as Ben Kenigsberg says in his
NY Times review, this means
Crime 101 is "less a guide to criminality than a manual for self-help." But if so what good would that be?
Crime 101, 120 mins., dropped in over 50 countries Feb. 12, 2026.
Metacritic rating: 68%.
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