Crime 101 is sleek like a Michael Mann venture, but with a healthy dose of 2020s nihilism. We can relish in it as a return to the mid-budget thriller, with its marquee of stars – Chris Hemsworth, Halle Berry, Mark Ruffalo and Barry Keoghan – and its deployment of LA as a steel and sun-dappled chessboard, without pickling ourselves in our own nostalgia. It’s hardly timid in its references, but it’s never confined by them either.
It takes a moment for writer-director Bart Layton – a documentarian working here for the first time in pure fiction by adapting a Don Winslow novella – to pin down his story. There are four major players and, at first, they intersect only by periodically passing each other on the 101 freeway. Mike Davis (Hemsworth) is a jewel thief with a conscience, who methodically strikes his targets along the 101, but abhors violence.
Detective Lou Lubesnick’s (Ruffalo) basic decency has him wallowing at the bottom of the precinct’s productivity chart. His wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is after a trial separation because he’s so alien to the concept of self-care that even his tongue struggles to get around the words “smoothie” and “yoga”.
Sharon Colvin (Berry) sells insurance to the odiously rich (including Tate Donovan’s Steve), and spends half her time justifying the exploitative nature of her work, the other half wondering why she can’t get a good night’s sleep. Finally, there’s Ormon (Keoghan), a rival thief who, like many a Keoghan role, is an agent of chaos with a bruised soul.
Lou hunts down Mike. Mike’s schemes put Sharon in his line of sight. Lou attempts to sway Sharon to his cause. Ormon threatens to spoil everyone’s fun. On paper, these characters may seem to function more as moral representatives than real people, but that they can still seem so charismatic on screen is a testament to the film’s cast. Ruffalo, for one, is our finest performer of hard-won, unironed goodness, with a buckled posture, a drooping cigarette as a permanent fixture, and a lovable twinkle in his eye.
Berry can slip easily between the volcanic rage and the shimmery performance of carelessness required for a Black woman over the age of 50 to survive such a ruthless, corporate space. When she finally lets out a demand of “shut the f*** up”, it’s glorious. Hemsworth, on some level, is a little ill-suited for Mike, who is introduced to us as forensically methodical, sanding off loose flakes of skin and hair to the sounds of a meditation tape and struggling to flirt with a beautiful woman (Monica Barbaro’s Maya).
You’d wish, maybe, for an actor who’s a little more willing to alienate his audience (take your pick from any David Fincher protagonist), but Hemsworth’s ability to balance all that ultra-masculinity with a touch of something more vulnerable has its use here – with Mike, Layton is able to blur the lines between what the law deems a thief, and what is constantly robbed from people from behind desks and in boardrooms.
Those boundaries are only further obliterated by how seamlessly the camera moves between spaces, in and out of open doors and down corridors. Not only does it help Crime 101 run like a finely tuned engine, so that all those disparate threads eventually intertwine, but it gets to the heart of what the film is really about: how much of yourself are you willing to sell for that increasingly elusive idea of financial security? When will it be enough?
Dir: Bart Layton. Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Barry Keoghan, Monica Barbaro, Corey Hawkins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Nolte, Halle Berry. Cert 15, 140 minutes.
‘Crime 101’ is in cinemas from 13 February
