Writer-director Bart Layton’s Crime 101 is Chris Hemsworth’s first non-franchise film since 2022’s Spiderhead, which makes it all the more unfortunate that, freed temporarily of Marvel’s shackles, his character here is so dully enigmatic. Mike Davis holds up couriers delivering millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry. He’s a meticulous heist operator, never violent beyond pointing a gun at his mark, and always ready with a getaway car. He’s clean cut, sporting freshly pressed shirts and jackets, approximating something like a modern wealthy drifter. His beachside property looks as if he moved into it fully furnished.
Mike is transparently cut from the mold of Ryan Gosling’s character from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive: moody, tightly coiled, and tantalizingly inscrutable. In lieu of having Hemsworth telegraph the same information, we get a handful of crumbs about Mike’s past growing up poor. Other figures like Halle Berry’s insurance adjuster and a romantic interest played by Monica Barbaro expositorily tell us that he might have OCD and that he refuses to look anyone in the eyes. The skittering eye contact should be an indicator of Mike’s inner conflict over staying in the con game or leaving with what he’s already accumulated, but Hemsworth’s muted performance doesn’t so much illuminate an inner life as suggest an actor lost in thought.
The actor’s stoicism ensures that the temperature of the cat and mouse game between Mike and a beleaguered L.A.P.D. detective, Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), who’s certain that he’s found the perpetrator behind a slew of robberies down the 101 freeway, barely rises above a simmer. Ruffalo is no stranger to playing dejected men on a mission, and his commitment to the role is impressive. Lubesnick is about to be abandoned by his partner (Corey Hawkins) for refusing to play the game to level up in the force, and when the film finally lets you see how clearly he can descend into the same depths as Mike, or even other crooked cops on his squad, the weight of whether to do the right thing or not discernibly ripples across Ruffalo’s face.
The film, which Layton adapted from Don Winslow’s 2020 novella of the same name, is ostensibly about the tension between trying to succeed in a cruel capitalist system that keeps people in a state of stasis and the temptation to engage in lawless opportunities in order to bathe in wealth. But Crime 101 at times feels unfocused, unsure of whether it should lean into its moments of character study, which Hemsworth is lost at sea within, or take pleasure in its more action-oriented elements, which have their charms but feel strangely insubstantial.
Crime 101 nods to the neo-noirs of the 1980s and ’90s, namely Michael Mann’s Thief and Heat, as evidenced by its woozy synth score and that metallic blue sheen that imbues some scenes. And it does so in the guise of a modern-day crime thriller, where characters are prone to spitting out aphorisms of the “rich get richer, poor stay poor” variety. Indeed, this is a film with palpable disdain for billionaire white dudes. But just as its gripes scarcely cut deep, Crime 101’s action scenes are diverting at best. Like Mike’s modus operandi as a criminal, the film goes through all the pro forma motions. Which is to say, it very much lives up to its title.
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