“Crime 101” sounds like the title of a cute caper movie, but this movie isn’t cute. It’s an underworld melodrama focused on a mysterious thief (Chris Hemsworth), a police detective obsessed with catching him (Mark Ruffalo), and an insurance broker (Halle Berry) whose company must pay out settlements to the people the thief has stolen from. The number in the title refers to the 101 Freeway in Southern California, the main artery that bears the thief to and from his targets. It has two first-rate car chases; luxurious cinematography that transforms Los Angeles into a city of dark magic; and a script filled with memorable supporting characters, including an ambitious young psycho played by Barry Keoghan; an elderly crime boss played by Nick Nolte; and a goodhearted young woman played by Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in “A Complete Unknown“) who falls for the thief without knowing what he does for a living.
The result will be reflexively compared to classic Michael Mann crime thrillers, for good reason: adapted by writer-director Bart Layton from the same-titled novel by Don Winslow, “Crime 101” shares Mann’s obsession with self-reliant, stoic characters and has a film-noir-in-color look that’s reminiscent of “Heat” and “Thief.” But the movie has many other influences, including hard-edged analog-era crime pictures like “Bullitt” and “The Driver” and classic gangster melodramas and film noir tragedies from the 1930s and ’40s like “Criss Cross,” “Angels with Dirty Faces” and “The Roaring Twenties” that focused on criminals with a code that drove their lives but could also be their death sentence.
The movie drops us into the story without preamble and lets us figure out what’s going on. Hemsworth’s character, Mike Davis, is driving around L.A., shadowing some crooks who are transporting pricey jewels to a criminal buyer. His plan is to interrupt the exchange and take the jewels for himself, and he does—until the tables turn and he’s so shocked that he’s forced to abort the mission. That doesn’t please his patron, a legendary underworld figure known only by his street name, Money (Nolte).
Although Money reassures Mike that he’s not in trouble for failing to follow through, he then gives the next big job, the robbery of jewels kept in a vault at a high-end jewelry store, to another of his guys, Ormon (Keoghan), a smug young man with spiky bleached hair and what turn out to be serious impulse control problems. We never get into the details of Money’s operation, but we infer from his conversations with Mike and Ormon that he’s a sinister father figure to troubled boys, grooming them into loyal personal soldiers.
Berry’s character, Sharon Colvin, works for the company that insured the jewels Mike robbed from the robbers. The jeweler who set up the original crime, Sammy Kassem (Payman Maadi), is the client her firm is supposed to pay. She’s been with the company for over a decade, is the only woman on staff of any significance, and is on deck to become a full partner, so it’s crucial that she deal with this swiftly at the same time that she’s trying to close an insurance policy on an arrogant billionaire
Sharon is immediately suspicious of Sammy and tries to enlist the detective, her old pal Lou Lubesnick (Ruffalo), to turn up the heat by declaring the jeweler a suspect and making him take a polygraph test. Lou, a hardworking idealist in a precinct house filled with clock-punchers and amoral careerists, declines and tells Sharon that if she thinks a polygraph is essential to her investigation, the company should do it themselves.
But Lou is running his own investigation, based on the theory that this is yet another entry on a list of two dozen recent robberies, all committed near a 101 freeway onramp. He believes that if he can get the right clues and put them all together, he can catch the thief that he’s been obsessed with for years, a masked and gloved phantom who leaves no useful physical evidence at crime scenes and gets in and out of jobs fast, with as little violence as possible. Lou’s colleagues, including his young partner Tillman (Corey Hawkins), think this is pure fantasy.
There is an increasing consensus that Lou has become an unproductive and difficult eccentric in a squad room that’s united in their desire to close cases by any means necessary, and is bringing down their collective clearance rate by worrying about minor details like whether they arrested the right person. Lou’s supervisor, who finds him irritating and holier-than-thou, warns him to “find a theory that works for the whole building,” which translates as “get with the program or get out.”
There’s a lot more going on with all the characters, and the movie gives them space to breathe, interact, and worry about more than the challenges that are right in front of them. “Crime 101” begins with a cross-cut montage of Mike, Sharon, and Lou preparing for the day’s events, while the soundtrack plays a relaxation tape Sharon uses each night, hoping it will help her fall asleep. (It never does.) The speaker alludes to becoming one with the universe and your fellow human beings, who are all connected to you, even if you don’t realize it.
This is a recurring motif that develops and expands throughout the movie, with conversations about free will and fate, and about how the cult of individuality, when practiced widely, has a destructive impact on society. Mike is rich thanks to his cut from all the heists, and Sharon’s doing very well herself, but Lou lives with his soon-to-be-ex wife Angie (Jennifer Jason Leigh, underused but effective) in a cluttered little house.
As we look at Lou’s world, as well as the homes and workspaces of other characters, we can’t help but mentally juxtapose it with the wealth and decadence of those characters, who seem to care about nothing except climbing the social ladder and getting even richer than they already are. There are shots of homeless encampments on the streets of Los Angeles, and when Mike opens up just a little bit to Maya and others, we learn (without researchable details) that he grew up poor, experiences severe class anxiety in luxurious spaces, and is trying to accumulate money so he can stop working at some point and enjoy life. When Maya asks if Mike has a “number in mind,” he says he does but won’t elaborate. Which is all by way of saying that this is an unusually class-conscious crime film to have been released by any major studio or streaming platform, let alone Amazon. It’s the rare big-budget Hollywood movie that has a very clear idea of what it wants to say, faithfully replicating genre clichés while putting a nifty spin on them.
The result is several cuts above the usual movie with DNA from “Heat.” At the risk of being exiled for heresy, it’s superior in certain extremely specific ways, especially in its ability to create a visceral sense of a whole society buzzing around its characters, and make each as lifelike as possible in whatever amount of time they’ve been allotted. The latter is especially evident in the film’s treatment of major female characters. They always come across as full human beings, apart from the men. There was applause at several points during the screening I attended, but the biggest reaction came not from a quotable threat or spectacular stunt, but from Sharon telling her boss what she thinks of him.
Hemsworth continues to prove that of all the screen actors so conventionally handsome that they could have been created in a lab to play superheroes, he’s the most versatile. He’s convincing here as a tall bruiser who does a superficially convincing imitation of a confident, happy man, but has trouble maintaining eye contact with others, and radiates a haunted energy that comes through if you spend enough time around him. We sometimes can see the deprived and neglected boy inside this man, even when he’s at his most intimidating. Mike is carrying around traumas he won’t reveal. Like, ever. This is a film that respects viewers enough to let them infer what isn’t shown or discussed.
Ruffalo’s unpredictable approach to this character is delightful. Lou speaks softly and nearly always has a faint smile on his face and a happy gleam in his eye, even when he’s being challenged, insulted, or threatened. He has terrible posture and doesn’t so much walk as shamble, and he clearly takes great pride in his ability to verbally sucker-punch a suspect with a question that wipes the smirk off their face and makes them realize that this grubby little man who smells like cigarettes and has a Mario mustache is going to put them behind bars. He’s the continuation of Columbo by other means.
This is a special movie. It has a life force unlike any other crime thriller I’ve seen. It’s about characters who suffer a personal failure but emerge transformed. It’s a violent movie, but not a cruel one, and unexpectedly moving by the end.
