Following a close call during a $3 million diamond heist, Davis (Chris Hemsworth) loses his nerve and questions his criminal path. The meticulous, serial Los Angeles jewel thief has built a careful career targeting high-end robberies along the 101 Freeway. Like Alain Delon’s hitman in Le Samouraï, Davis wraps his crimes in a strict code: never hurt anyone, never deviate from the plan.
Money (Nick Nolte) — a legendary underworld fence who grooms troubled young men — gets the sense that Davis is damaged goods, so he reassigns the next big score to Ormon (Barry Keoghan), an unpredictable young biker with bleached blonde hair, a brutal criminal lineage and serious impulse control problems.
Bart Layton previously directed the excellent, experimental heist film American Animals. That movie combined actors like Keoghan and Evan Peters playing real-life college students-turned-art-thieves alongside the actual students commenting on the events playing out in the film. Crime 101 doesn’t include any purely documentary elements, but Layton’s frames are lived-in and packed with realistic detailing highlighted by a light and shadows styling fitting this 21st-century noir. The opening montage of couriers and criminals arriving at a diamond delivery is intercut with upside-down shots of the Los Angeles skyline at night. A yoga instructor intones ironically in voiceover: “You hold the power to create all that you desire out of nothing.”
Searching for a way out of the criminal life, Davis’s path crosses with Sharon Combs (Halle Berry), a disillusioned insurance broker whose company pays out high-dollar settlements to Davis’s wealthy victims. Sharon is facing her own crossroads, stuck selling high-end policies to wealthy elites while questioning her life choices. Davis hopes one final $11-million-dollar score will give him the walk-away money he needs to make a fresh start. The question becomes whether he can actually walk away at all.
Layton’s cast of characters is rounded out by Detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo) and his partner Detective Tillman (Corey Hawkins). Lou’s identified a pattern in the 101 Freeway robberies and is convinced one man is responsible for them all. Lou is the last honest cop in an LAPD that’s become a corporation, where the pressure to close cases at any cost makes his old-school integrity seem irrelevant. Fellow detectives see Lubesnick as a kind of nutjob conspiracy theorist, and Tillman questions whether his connection with Lou is hampering his own ambitions to climb the ladder into LAPD leadership. Lou’s estranged wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has left him, and his superiors want him padding arrest stats instead of chasing an imaginary thief. Despite objections, Lou is obsessed, and as the ultimate heist looms, the line between cop and criminal begins to blur.
The cast and Bart Layton’s script co-written with Peter Straughan are mostly excellent here. Between all the characters struggling with their various challenges in their intermingled careers, Layton’s only misstep is trying to shoehorn a romantic interest into the mix.
Maya (Monica Barbaro) meets Davis in a fender-bender mishap that registers the first false note of the film. I blame Layton more than Barbaro, and everything between her and Davis should be cut away from this story. Crime 101 is muscular and gritty at its best. It’s not breaking new ground, but its strength is the integrity of the story, the characters and the performances that bring them to life. Pasting an obligatory romantic angle over the top of these intense proceedings is a major miscalculation.
Crime 101 is focused and relentless. It’s a story about ambition and achievement, but also about plain old survival on the mean streets of Los Angeles. It’s a wide-ranging police story that spans from criminal meetups in diners to high-stakes corporate headquarters to cluttered detective desks at the LAPD. It manages an ensemble of distinct, fully-fleshed-out characters with competing motives, but similar goals, and the blurry moral ambiguities that continually surface only add to the gripping texture of a movie that delivers the energy of a heist thriller along with the deeper human subtext viewers only find in the best of the genre.
Crime 101 is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.