MOVIE REVIEW – Crime 101 doesn’t hook you with the usual “big score, bigger twist” swagger – it wins by being sly and a little strange. Two L.A. car chases feel almost unplanned, yet the movie keeps insisting it’s a character piece, not an action ride. Beneath the crime mechanics, it’s really four interlocked portraits, and the cast is given enough room to make that the point.

Crime 101 is a sly underworld picture that hooks you with odd little feints rather than big genre promises. It does stage two Los Angeles car chases that feel almost improvised – like the drivers are choosing exits on instinct – yet the movie isn’t built as an action machine. At the center is Davis (Chris Hemsworth), a jewel thief whose jobs are surgical enough to qualify as heists, even if the film refuses the breezy trapdoor rhythm of a “heist thriller.” There’s plenty of crime, but the engine is character – four studies braided together. Adapted from Don Winslow’s novella Savages, it’s moody and intricate in a way that can nudge you toward Michael Mann’s Thief, though what it’s really after is a portrait of lost souls trying to keep their balance in a corrupt ecosystem. That may be why it plays like a quiet head game, the kind of move that can unsettle a box office while keeping you locked in.

Hemsworth’s Cool, Nolte’s Rasp, Ruffalo’s Last Honest Cop

What kept me leaning forward was how generously the film lets its cast stamp the screen. In the extended opener, Davis lifts a stash of hot diamonds from a local jeweler and his helpers – he stops them in their cars, then survives by the luckiest margin when a shot from an ancient, malfunctioning pistol whistles past. Hemsworth sells it at peak cool, and for ten minutes you catch yourself thinking, “Should this guy be the next James Bond?”

Then Davis reconnects with his boss, Money, and Nick Nolte gives the role an old man’s serrated rasp that’s as dramatic as his wry midlife heat used to be. It also reframes Hemsworth. With the cropped dark hair, the beard, and a flicker of dread behind the eyes, Davis comes off sharp, distracted, even a touch jittery. Jittery about what? He’s ruthless at the work, but he never seems entirely at ease in the world he’s chosen – or in his own skin. That barely submerged anxiety turns this into one of Hemsworth’s best performances and keeps the movie productively off-kilter.

Davis runs his jobs along the 101 and keeps to one rule: he doesn’t hurt anyone. Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), a savvy LAPD detective, clocks the pattern. So how do you catch a thief who’s careful enough to leave no blood? Ruffalo, doughy and unshaven, with an unfashionable heap of graying curls, plays Lou as L.A.’s last honest cop, and the film’s idea of corruption around him is its own kind of rot. This LAPD has started to operate like a corporation, where closing cases feels like closing deals, and the pressure drives everyone toward results at any cost. Lou, an old-school knight with a weathered, “irrelevant” integrity, reads as a loser to his colleagues – and the movie twists the knife when his long-time girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) leaves him.

Glass Ceilings and Helmeted Threats

Halle Berry, meanwhile, plays Sharon Coombs as a winner stuck in the wrong line of work. She’s a high-end insurance broker pitching expensive policies to rich clients, sweetening the sale with a trace of seduction. Eleven years into the job, she’s still watching the old boys’ network stall on making her a partner. She’s slammed into a glass ceiling with no clear exit, and Berry threads her charisma with anger that ripples into despair. That makes Sharon an enticing connection for Davis, who needs fresh potential marks, and for Lou, whom she meets in a yoga class. The fact that she’s plausibly tied to both criminal and cop is one of those only-in-movies contrivances you either accept or you don’t. It’s a wobbly hinge, but Berry gives it enough emotional weight to hold.

The last major player is Ormon (Barry Keoghan), the thug Money hires to menace his former protégé and to make sure any score ends with the cash landing in the right pocket – his. Keoghan spends most of his scenes buried under a motorcycle helmet and biker gear, often reduced to a pair of eyes. It’s to his credit that the character still bursts through, in the brutish impatience of every movement.

The Beverly Wilshire Endgame

Writer-director Bart Layton films L.A. with an expansive feel for its anonymous concrete corners, and he takes his time (the movie runs two hours and 19 minutes). He lingers on moments like Davis’s first date with Maya (Monica Barbaro, charismatically sunny), whom he meets after she rear-ends his car, or Sharon’s scenes at the insurance office, a viper pit where a younger rival is starting to eclipse her. The payoff is that this sprawl becomes the movie’s way of shading in why people choose crime. Davis, raised in foster care, is trying to build an ordered world he can control. That’s why he’s such a cautious thief – controlled to a fault – and why he breaks with Money over a Santa Barbara jewelry-store job he thinks is too risky, even as the loose-cannon Ormon takes it anyway and turns it into a violent mess.

If the criminals in Crime 101 are often more interesting than their crimes, the climactic robbery staged in a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel finally delivers the jolt of manic danger you’ve been waiting for. It plays like a layer cake of deception, with Davis impersonating the driver who’s picked up the diamond courier and Lou impersonating the courier (the two share a great back-and-forth about Steve McQueen), all of it building toward a shootout that exposes what each person in the room is made of. As a thriller it has its indulgences, but by the end it lands as an advanced course in what underworld dreams are built from.

– Gergely Herpai „BadSector”-