Two films that are competing at next month's Oscars, One Battle After Another and The Secret Agent, have the look and feel of movies made a half-century ago. And, just last month, the lauded indie Dead Man's Wire revived the spirit of the 1975 classic Dog Day Afternoon.
That same feeling is alive and well in Bart Layton's tensely satisfying Crime 101, a noir-ish yet sun-baked, Los Angeles-set heist thriller whose clever title serves double duty as both alluding to an innocent's introduction to the underworld and the number for the famous highway, also known as the Hollywood Freeway and the Ventura Freeway, that slices through the heart of Los Angeles like a fault line.
Chris Hemsworth, in one of his most layered roles, is Mike Davis, an elusive loner of a jewel thief who gets in and out of his targets, all within spitting distance of the 101, without getting caught and without hurting anyone. In fact, he lives by a strict code that no one is to be harmed in the commission of his crimes.
But that code seems to be getting harder to maintain and the man he works for, appropriately named Money and played with a gruff intensity by Nick Nolte, doesn't have much time for Mike's niceties. In fact, Money hires a new Mike named Ormon (a bleach-blond Barry Keoghan) who shares none of Mike's resistance to violence.
Mike is considering getting out of the business while the getting is good and it just so happens that his ambivalence crosses paths with the payback sought by Sharon (Halle Berry), an aggrieved insurance broker who has no history in crime but does possess a particularly sharp bone to pick with her age-ist employer and his notoriously difficult high-end clientele. What if Mike and Sharon work together?
But Lou is convinced that he's pulling on the thread that will get the thief's plans to unravel.
Clocking in at 140 minutes, Crime 101 takes its time getting to its destination. Yet director Bart Layton, who made the suspenseful and underrated 2018 heist film American Animals as well as the 2012 documentary The Imposter about a grieving San Antonio family hoodwinked by a French con artist claiming to be their missing son, never lets things lag.
The first-rate cast, especially Berry as a woman ready to make a major change in her life and Keoghan as a guy who wears his instability like a badge of honor, always keeps things intriguing, even when the plot verges on the predictable.
Plus, a couple of well-staged chase scenes give Crime 101 a sense of needed propulsion.
There are obvious parallels to such other Los Angeles-based thrillers such as Heat and To Live And Die in L.A. and, truthfully, Crime 101 is not quite in that league. Someone on Reddit even went so far as to call it a "dollar store Heat". Ouch!
But, even in a dollar store, it's possible to something of value. – The Houston Chronicle/Tribune News Service
Summary:
Thrilling heist flick brings the 'Heat'
