Crime 101 may be an elective but it does give you
extra credit towards a degree in Hemsworthology
dir: Bart Layton
2026
If you’re going to call a movie Crime 101 you could at least have some educational material embedded in the flick. But no. This flick taught me absolutely nothing about crime that I didn’t already know. Crime hurts people. Crime doesn’t pay, unless you’re rich enough to have political cover, in which case, crime absolutely does pay.
I did learn one other strange factoid from watching this flick: Americans are so inured to gun violence, so worshipful of their shiny metal dicks, that you’ll have a so-called law enforcement officer repeat multiple times that a suspected crim (Doug Hemsworth) is not a violent criminal, even though he points guns at people’s heads in carrying out his daring raids. Many times.
That’s not considered a violent act in today’s America.
Anyway, what is this flick: Obviously one with crimes in it. A crime thriller, if you will. A kind of simplistic and not very believable one, but somewhat enjoyable all the same. Many of the parts don’t fit, and there’s one element, being the character played by Barry Keoghan, who seems like he’s from a completely different movie. Still, the Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo and Halle Berry do okay with some stock standard characters.
Ruffalo especially feels like he’s played this before, at least a couple of times. You have to know, even though you never asked, it’s both comforting and disconcerting to watch Ruffalo playing dishevelled over the hill “I’m too old for this shit” cop characters. For years (well, before all the Marvel Hulk stuff), he was put forward as the thinking woman’s piece of crumpet, and now he looks like someone you’d avoid making eye contact with if he was in your pilates class, huffing and puffing away.
He’s still solid though, as you would think he would be. His last bunch of films have been grating and disappointing (at least for me, and I'm talking about his Trump impression in Mickey 17, and whatever the hell he was doing (and whatever the hell that accent was) in Poor Things, but this is a comfortable fit, given the character’s practically the same as what he played in that excellent mini-series Task.
Hemsworth is… I admit I’ve never known nor will I ever know the immense burden of having the magnificent body of a Greek (or Norse) god, and the chiselled good looks to go along with it, but Hemsworth is not someone you go to hoping to play a character with depth, with layers, with a complicated psychology behind them. He’s just not that kind of actor. One emotion at a time. Anger. Olympian arrogance. Deep regret. Sadness (le boo hoo), maybe.
I just think, and this is only me blabbering, watching him try to convey delicate or complicated emotions is almost a form of comedy in itself. Mike, the crim character he plays here, is meant to be motivated by more than just wanting to score big dollars. The yawning, gaping need within him, from having grown up with abuse and neglect in the foster system is meant to equal understandable motivation for committing all sorts of crimes in the pursuit of wealth.
It is hilarious that this is the tack they’re taking. I urge everyone who grew up in the foster system to go out there and steal all the diamonds! Knock over DeBeers itself, the jerks who control the global diamond trade. You would be doing the world a favour.
Because this film was marketed as being an updated Heat for the 2020s, like we asked for it, Hemsworth is meant to be the De Niro character, Ruffalo is Pacino, Monica Barbaro is the thankless ‘girlfriend’ character Amy Brenneman played last time, and Barry Keoghan’s character? Like I said, he’s from a different movie, he doesn’t have a close analogue, nowhere near what Val Kilmer or even Ashley Judd did.
I never really thought Heat was that great back in the day, in fact I found the ending ludicrous and risible, but it does have its fans. I don’t know who Bart Layton is, being the director here, but he’s no Michael Mann.
Layton knows enough, though, to ape Mann where he can. All I was waiting for was more wailing saxophones in the background, more neon drenched night scenes, more pastel suits.
Oh and Nick Nolte is in this as well, and he’s terrifying. His voice barely works, and sounds like rocks grinding together. I don’t know what Hollywood or smoking have done to him, but it has to stop. Sign him up for voluntary euthanasia already, even if he’s not on board.
I think he played a character called Money, as in the shotcaller organising Mike’s jobs and giving him inside info with which to pull his fussy jobs without having to kill people, but calling a greedy jerk character “Money” seems a bit on the nose. Surely they didn’t do something that crass *looks up IMDB* oh look, no, they did do that, my mistake.
Mike lives in apartments or beach houses that are right on the beach. He needs to be able to look at the water. I hoped it was because he couldn’t swim, or was scared of jellyfish or something, but it’s more an OCD / wealth thing. He is a nervy type; none of this unflappable cool that DeNiro or anyone else might embody. Heavy breathing panic attacks are kind of his thing.
He always performs his jobs, separating people from their diamonds, or the diamonds they’re meant to be transporting somewhere, by meticulously checking out where it’s going to be done, disconnecting any nearby surveillance, and getting enough info on the targets to be able to scare them into thinking that something might happen to their families if they don’t comply with his demands, all while pointing a gun at their heads. And these jobs are always along Highway 101, hence the title.
That he hasn’t yet shot someone in the face is meant to make him seem like a sensitive, deep down “good” person, regardless of all the criming.
It’s a bold stance to take, but I am comforted by the fact that it’s a stance that seems to only exist in American movies. You know, it’s an idea that Americans find credible (when their characters are played by attractive white types), that the rest of the world looks at quizzically, head tilted to one side.
Ruffalo’s character is: Dishevelled older detective whose wife is leaving him (waste of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s time casting her here for 30 seconds), who has cracked the pattern of Mike’s crimes, but no-one believes him.
Halle Berry plays an insurance agent who is tired of being disrespected at work and is keen for a big payday in order to... wait, what the justification for her actions again? Oh yeah, plot convenience. The being-treated-like-a-pariah-at-work-bit-for-being-53 bit was strange, but still galling, and it made you want to see the jerk talking like that to her to be shot in the face by Barry Keoghan’s character, maybe, but instead we get Berry playing a regular person, called Sharon, who is nowhere near as tough as many of the characters she’s played in other flicks.
She is the one who mentions The Thomas Crown Affair though, which was clearly a thin inspiration here, but I would argue this flick would have been better plotted had there been a relationship between herself and Mike.
Because otherwise the galling element in the film over how she’s treated by her jerk employers, where they bring a 23-year-old in woman to effectively replace her, is what the flick does in inserting Monica Barbaro’s character as a distracting love interest for Mike.
Don’t get me wrong I think Barbaro’s a fine actor, and she’s been great in other things (she played a great Joan Baez in the mini-Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown a couple of years ago), but she’s a person too many in a flick that has too many characters already.
She’s only there to emphasise that Mike isn’t gay (which we already knew because he’s shown as frequently availing himself of the services of ‘ladies of the night’) and that he has a black hole of a personality; a thin veneer of expected behaviours thinly strained over the gaping void inside.
He could easily have done all that stuff with Halle Berry’s character. They also had better chemistry, I would argue, as in there’s some chemistry with Sharon, and nil with Maya (Barbaro’s character).
Look, I mostly like hanging out with these characters played by these actors. I could watch Ruffalo do his tax returns or fill out questionnaires for hours. This film does feel like it drags its arse for a g e s getting to the finish line, though. Ye gods. I wouldn’t mind seeing a version of this without the psychopathic Ormon character played by Keoghan, but then I guess the ending wouldn’t work that well.
Ruffalo’s character and Mike are kept away from each other for way too long, until almost the end of the film, where they’re in a car together. And part of me was like “c’mon, you jerks have been in so many Marvel movies together, surely you recognise each other?” But nah, I guess the Marvel movies don’t exist in the cool, neon lit universe that this flick inhabits.
Does it hang together as a crime thriller type flick? Well, I guess. The flick kinda peaks in its first 10 minutes, and not in a good way. It gives us a set piece at the beginning, and then doesn’t deliver anything remotely as sharp as that for the rest of the movie. The flick ends with a shoulder shrug so casual, so indifferent that it felt like hmm, if none of these people really care about the outcome, then why would I?
It was okay along the way. It really felt like I was watching “tv” rather than a movie, though, and part of me is now questioning whether it needed to exist at all.
6 times just because you don’t have childhood photos lying around doesn’t always mean you’re necessarily a master thief / serial killer / lifestyle influencer out of 10
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“That's the thing about walk-away money. You have to be able to actually walk away with it” – sage advice - Crime 101
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