Crime 101: Bart Layton’s high-octane heist leans into style over moral depth
Crime 101 arrives as a glossy, fast-moving entry in the modern heist canon, trading the slow-burn indirectness of the director’s earlier work for full-throttle momentum. The film showcases a polished lead performance, sharp craft work and a willingness to borrow the visual language of classic LA crime thrillers. It is, in short, an entertaining thriller that occasionally fumbles when it attempts to register deeper social meaning.
Plot and performances
The story centers on Mike, a consummate professional thief played with cool precision by Chris Hemsworth. Mike’s robberies—executed with surgical nonviolence and a fetish for sleek black performance cars—trace a pattern along California’s iconic coastal artery. That pattern attracts the attention of a weary but diligent LAPD detective, Lou Lubesnick, portrayed with dishevelled charm by Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo’s turn channels the dogged single-investigator energy of classic television gumshoes while remaining grounded and sympathetic.
Nick Nolte adds grit as Money, an older mentor figure who shepherded Mike into the criminal life when he was in foster care. The dynamic between Mike and Money propels much of the film’s tension: one man seeking an exit strategy and the other, a custodian of old-school criminal codes, wary of change. Barry Keoghan’s Ormon provides a foil—a jittery, reckless presence with too much bravado and not enough discipline—whose volatility threatens to upend carefully planned jobs. Halle Berry plays Sharon, an insurance agent ensnared into providing inside information for a high-stakes score, while Monica Barbaro offers emotional ballast as Mike’s girlfriend, kept deliberately in the dark about his work.
Style, influences and shortcomings
Director Bart Layton dials up sheen and speed. The film bears stylistic echoes of a certain school of LA crime cinema—wide, urgent framing, taut pacing and a near-obsessive attention to the mechanics of theft. At times the movie feels like a pastiche of that vein of filmmaking, channeling its visual energy without adopting every mannerism wholesale. The result is a heist picture that looks and sounds authoritative: slick cars, clinical gear, and crisp editing keep the engine revving.
That technical confidence is the movie’s chief selling point, but it also reveals where the film is less assured. When Crime 101 ventures into social commentary—briefly gesturing at homelessness and urban decay—the treatment feels cursory. These moments read as texture rather than conviction, scenery for a narrative that remains more interested in clean execution than in probing systemic forces. The film’s moral arc, particularly Mike’s late-arriving qualms about his chosen life, lands unevenly; the drama is compelling in the moment but resists a fully realized reckoning.
Verdict and release
On balance, Crime 101 is a rewarding genre piece. Hemsworth anchors the film with a performance that balances charm and menace, supported by strong work from Ruffalo and Nolte. The director’s choice to prioritize aerodynamic storytelling over the meta-commentary and indirect flourishes of his earlier pictures produces a taut, crowd-pleasing thriller that will satisfy viewers who come for craft and momentum.
Crime 101 is scheduled to open in Australia on February 12 and in the UK and US on February 13 (dates presented in ET). Fans of smartly mounted robberies and star-driven thrillers will find much to enjoy, even if the film’s attempts at social critique feel perfunctory alongside its more immediate pleasures.
