Crime 101 review: Hemsworth’s smooth thief steers a stylish, familiar heist
Crime 101 is a glossy, adult-minded take on the highway heist, driven by a starry cast and a director sharpening his procedural instincts. Bart Layton’s second feature adapts a novella into a moody cops‑and‑robbers yarn that revels in craft and control even as it leans on familiar genre beats.
Plot and performances
The film centers on Mike, a disciplined jewel thief played with cool restraint by Chris Hemsworth, who favors sleek cars and surgical precision over gratuitous violence. He learned the trade from Money, a grizzled mentor, and keeps his personal life compartmentalized: he won’t tell his girlfriend what he does, and he’s wary of the chaotic new blood moving into his territory. That volatility comes in the form of Ormon, a trigger‑happy upstart whose flashy rider aesthetic threatens to upend the careful rhythms Mike has created.
Opposite Hemsworth is a hangdog detective, Lou, portrayed with weary determination by Mark Ruffalo. Lou’s single-minded hunch — that a string of robberies aligns along the Pacific Coast Highway — gives the film its cat‑and‑mouse momentum. Halle Berry rounds out the central trio as Sharon, an insurance adjuster with a career ceiling to smash; her storyline adds a human, workplace‑frustration spine to the procedural mechanics.
The cast anchors the material. Hemsworth’s performance trades on understatement rather than bravado, making Mike’s cracks in composure more affecting. Ruffalo provides the moral energy that keeps the chase feeling grounded. Supporting turns, including an effective Nick Nolte as the old guard who still pulls strings, give the world depth without crowding the core dynamic.
Style, influences and limitations
Layton steers the film with a clear visual appetite: crisp digital photography frames Los Angeles as a glittering, sun‑bleached expanse where precise planning and timing rule the day. Two car chases deliver genuine jolts of adrenaline, and the director’s taste for measured, moody staging recalls the polished tension of classic crime films. The highway motif is used cleverly, making Route 101 itself feel like a low hum of inevitability beneath the characters’ moves.
That visual confidence invites comparisons to seminal heist cinema; the film knows its landmarks and borrows the cool, methodical tone of the genre’s best. Yet that familiarity is double‑edged. At times Crime 101 adheres too closely to archetypes — the stoic professional thief, the dogged cop with one good theory, the volatile young foil — and some of the movie’s social observations feel perfunctory, skimming Los Angeles’ inequalities without digging in. The script’s attempt at social commentary, for example, passes through scenes of the city’s marginalised in ways that read shorthand rather than substantive interrogation.
Still, where the film works it does so reliably: the heist sequences are crisp, the tension between method and chaos is well maintained, and the cast elevates thinner beats into emotional payoffs. The film isn’t aiming to reinvent the wheel; it’s content to show a master thief’s last‑act wobble and let the consequences unfurl with grim inevitability.
Verdict and release
Crime 101 is a well‑constructed, highly watchable thriller that will satisfy viewers who enjoy methodical, adult heist dramas. It doesn’t reach the operatic scope of the field’s towering exemplars, but its craftsmanship, lead performances and high‑gear set pieces make for a compelling evening in the cinema.
The film is released on February 12, 2026 (ET) in Australia and February 13, 2026 (ET) in the US and the UK.
