Movie Review: "Crime 101" Gets A Passing Grade On The Crime Thriller Formula

8/12 ForReel Score | 3.5/5 Stars

Every major American city has its own flavor of crime film. New York has Goodfellas and The French Connection, Chicago has Thief and The Untouchables, Boston has The Departed and The Town, and so on. Being a staple of crime-thriller filmmaking isn’t exclusive to one city, but there’s no skirting the fact that the canon of Los Angeles crime films stands far above the rest. If Heat and To Live and Die in L.A. weren’t stone-cold proof of L.A. being the de facto crime thriller city, then add Collateral, Drive, Chinatown, and Training Day to create a beginner’s guide to the L.A. crime film landscape; thankfully, Bart Layton has it covered with (the fittingly titled) Crime 101. The former documentarian’s latest is exactly what it says on the tin: a meticulously sleek thriller indebted to the iconography of L.A. crime films.

Layton’s first feature was the BAFTA-winning The Impostor, a true-crime documentary investigating Frédéric Pierre Bourdin, a serial impersonator dubbed “The Chameleon”. Finding a niche within true-crime, Layton dipped his toe into the water with American Animals, a docudrama about the Transylvania University book heist where the perpetrators’ interviews are interspliced with an Ocean’s-esque heist thriller starring Evan Peters and Barry Keoghan. Crime 101–adapted from Don Winslow’s 2020 novella of the same name–is Layton’s first foray into fiction, and it reads like classic airport pulp in the best way possible. It’s not an early lock for the 2027 Oscars or anything, but Crime 101 is a reliably well-oiled machine that, given its intimidating two-hour and twenty-minute runtime, moves fast and looks good doing it.

A classic game of cat and mouse, Chris Hemsworth stars as Mike (the mouse) while Mark Ruffalo plays Det. Lou Lubesnick (the cat). You’ve seen it a billion times before, whether it’s Pacino and De Niro or Petersen and Dafoe, but it’ll never fail to be compelling when done right. Being less of a guns-blazing thriller than a paranoid collision course of several moving parts, Layton allows for lots of downtime with his characters (something Michael Mann understood very well), following Lubesnick through a slow divorce while Mike strikes up a romance with Maya (an always-welcome Monica Barbaro). The story of a cop falling out of love while the robber falls in–also cribbed from Heat–is as generic a setup as it gets, but the interpersonal drama is well-acted enough (Mike is “a bit OCD,” as Sharon puts it) to keep the ball rolling without things veering too far into the realm of staleness.

Halle Berry goes full Erin Brockovich as Sharon, an undervalued longtime VP at an insurance firm (which just so happens to ensure what Mike steals) who’s at her wits' end with white-collar capital. Supporting Hemsworth, Ruffalo, and Berry are Nick Nolte, who’s essentially Jon Voight in Heat, while Barry Keoghan (reuniting with Layton after American Animals) does his best impression of Robert Pattinson in Good Time. He’s a volatile loose cannon in the same way that Kevin Gage’s Waingro was in Heat (there always has to be someone who crosses the line), but with that same unpredictability that made Keoghan such a menace in The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The ensemble is a hodgepodge of different characters from different movies, and to call Crime 101 “inspired” wouldn’t exactly be a stretch of the imagination, but, somehow, it works.

What makes Crime 101 work is how shamelessly and proudly it wears its influences on its sleeve. Mark Ruffalo playing a detective who’s ahead of the curve on a mysterious criminal is directly cribbed from Collateral; Chris Hemsworth playing a thief with the walls closing in feels very similar to Ryan Gosling’s unnamed role in Drive–there’s even a scene where Ruffalo and Hemsworth talk Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair. There’s such an earnest reverence for the “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” dad thriller that Crime 101 almost comes across as charming, when it’s not propulsively exhilarating. Bart Layton understands a fundamental component of what makes films like Michael Mann’s so effective. There’s simplicity in cool cars, hot actors whose characters are good at their jobs, and beauty shots of the L.A. skyline.

There’s no crime story more reliable than that of the “cops and robbers” setup, drawing lines of morality in the sand that blur as shit progressively hits the fan. It’s a sandbox that writers have played in for centuries, whether it be movies, television, or books, and it’ll never feel trite as long as filmmakers like Bart Layton, inspired by the greats like Mann, Friedkin, and Soderbergh, are steering the ship. At no point is Layton’s script reinventing the wheel, but the competence in his filmmaking is strong enough for me to just cozy up in my seat and enjoy the ride. Some movies are love letters, some movies are manifestos, but Crime 101 is an entire syllabus, and will work best for those who have done their homework.