Crime 101 Review – A Quality Survey Course
Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic
I’m a sucker for a good heist movie or crime drama. You can go back nearly 100 years and find great heist flicks from some of the biggest names in film history. It’s all been done before, more or less, but Crime 101 is the latest addition to the catalog, a cat-and-mouse story that unashamedly draws from some of the genre's greats to create a crime thriller for the modern age.
Set in sunny Los Angeles, Crime 101 stars Chris Hemsworth as Mike Davis, an elusive thief who has pulled off a string of high-end robberies along the 101 highway. Mike is so elusive that Detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo) is the only man in the LAPD who thinks the crimes Mike is pulling are connected in any way.
A job nearly goes wrong for Mike, and he begins to look for a way out of his life of crime, angling for one last big score involving an insurance broker named Sharon Combs (Halle Berry). However, Mike’s plan to get out angers his mover, Money (Nick Nolte), who has other plans and sticks Orman (Barry Keoghan), an unpredictable young upstart, on Mike’s tail. Mike’s life is further complicated by an unexpected, blossoming relationship with a woman named Maya (Monica Barbaro).
Mike, Lou, and Sharon are the main characters around whom the movie is built upon. Early on, the film shows moments of their lives passing by each other without intersecting, which will eventually happen. This made me worried that the film might be trying to make a heist thriller, but with a Crash/Babel “It’s all connected!” twist, but thankfully, it doesn’t go down that road.
Mike is an antihero that you could see in a Michael Mann movie. He is meticulous in planning his jobs, very deliberate in executing them, and goes to great lengths to make himself a ghost, even scrubbing himself of dry skin and loose hair to avoid leaving any potential DNA evidence, as seen in the film's opening moments. In short, he is a man with a code: a code he has built for himself to aspire to the life he wants, having come from nothing as a child. He feels like his luck is running out. Hemsworth plays Mike as a competent, slightly paranoid man with poor social skills.
Halle Berry’s insurance broker, Sharon, despite wanting to believe otherwise, is being strung along by her firm, which has promised to make her a partner. Early on, she flubs a meeting with a would-be client, and it becomes clear with her increasing frustration and desperation why Mike sees her as someone to target for what he believes is a victimless crime. Berry does a nice job of making her increasingly desperate, yet still someone with character and pride.
Detective Lou is perhaps in a similar work situation to Sharon, floundering as a detective and alienating his co-workers for wanting to do actual detective work rather than clearing cases and making the department’s number look good. His obsession with the 101 thief is not winning him any friends, and as his captain tells him at one point, he should have been in the captain position years ago instead of him. A failing marriage at home and dwindling support at work are testing his resolve. Ruffalo gives the character a world-weariness due to his commitment to the job that evokes a schlubbier version of Pacino’s Vincent Hanna in Heat.
The two wild cards in the equation are the love interest in Maya and the unstable Orman. Mike and Maya have a literal fender bender meet-cute. She knows almost immediately that something is off with him because of his vagueness and lack of connections to anything that could tie him down. She represents not just an alternative to the life he lives, but the potential to live for something other than himself and reach the dollar figure he has in his head to get out and live comfortably.
As Orman, Keoghan is enigmatic, unpredictable, and probably a sociopath. He is also inexperienced, as evidenced by his first job at Money, where things do not go as planned, and he must improvise on the spot. He’s a lesson in contrast to Hemsworth’s Mike, who is methodical and measured, whereas Orman is less in control of his emotions and more impetuous.
The title of this film is almost certainly one with a double meaning. The crimes Mike has been committing are along the 101 in LA, but a 101 class is also an introductory study of a subject, a beginner class designed for the uninitiated to serve as a foundation for further study. In many ways, this film could serve as an introductory lesson in crime thrillers for a new generation of movie fans.
All the classic elements are on display in a modernized package. The cat-and-mouse game between the cop and the criminal, with the story told on both sides of the law. There is an element of a “one last job” to the plan Mike is trying to execute. The complicating love interest. All that and more.
There is no denying that the film wears its influences on its sleeve, and Heat is perhaps the most obvious one; Hemsworth is the DeNiro to Ruffalo’s Pacino here. But it is not trying to be Heat or shamelessly rip it off. It is a competent film that knows what it is doing, where it is going, and weaves the stories of the three main leads together to take the audience on an enjoyable ride, even if it falls a little short of the heights of the movies that ultimately inspired it.
Like any good 101 course, it’s a strong introduction to a subject. My hope for this film is that the audience enjoys it. Maybe, for a new generation of movie fans, it prompts them to seek out those influences and to go deeper into the crime subgenre.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars