{"id":468618,"date":"2026-02-11T19:13:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T19:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/468618\/"},"modified":"2026-02-11T19:13:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T19:13:09","slug":"chris-hemsworth-drives-michael-mann-knockoff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/468618\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Hemsworth Drives Michael Mann Knockoff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zipping along the 101 freeway from downtown Los Angeles up to Santa Barbara, writer\/director Bart Layton\u2019s \u201cCrime 101<\/a>\u201d certainly understands at least one thing: that driving around L.A. at night is always cinematic, even if other hours of the sun-bleached day in the Southern California city are inherently less so.<\/p>\n

The \u201cMagnolia\u201d of Michael Mann<\/a> knockoffs \u2014 and one with enough slowly gliding overhead drone shots of the city to only start to feel like the downtown LA screensaver on your Apple TV in its interstices \u2014 \u201cCrime 101\u201d is an effective, not to mention star-packed, thriller that mostly succeeds at what it\u2019s trying to achieve, and directed by the guy who broke out big in 2012 with the mind-bending, true-crime impersonation documentary \u201cThe Impostor.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"John<\/a> \"The<\/a> <\/p>\n

The ensemble includes Chris Hemsworth<\/a>, Halle Berry, Barry Keoghan, Corey Hawkins, Monica Barbaro, Tate Donovan, and Nick Nolte in a pricey-looking made-for-Amazon crime epic that will stream fine on Prime, will perhaps play even better on airplanes, but also may even deserve your eyes and ears in theaters. That\u2019s even as, creatively, this film<\/a> feels like it\u2019s hijacking at least 15 other, better movies, whether Mann\u2019s \u201cHeat\u201d and \u201cCollateral\u201d or Nicolas Winding Refn\u2019s \u201cDrive\u201d or \u201cBullitt\u201d with Steve McQueen, simply by the green shade of Hemsworth\u2019s car.<\/p>\n

What does not package \u201cCrime 101\u201d neatly for theaters is the fact that second-screen viewing is basically not an option. Adapting and expanding upon a lean Don Winslow novella, Layton adds many sometimes unnecessarily complex ingredients to the pot, with characters intersecting and allegiances and motivations often contradicting one another. <\/p>\n

To boil it down, the film\u2019s central antihero is the taciturn, steely, and just-on-the-verge-of-disillusioned jewel thief Mike Davis (Hemsworth, seemingly cast because of his work with Mann as a skilled hacker on \u201cBlackhat,\u201d and absolutely not because he played Thor). His string of heists up and down the 101 has left Detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo<\/a>, ever these days playing an alcoholic, a divorc\u00e9e, or a cop, and here he\u2019s just two of them) mystified. Mike lives a lonely life seemingly devoid of any interiority, working for an over-the-hill crime boss known as Money (Nick Nolte), whom Mike has managed to piss off with his less-than-spotless latest burglary. Mike elects to go out on his own, and thus Money dispatches the mangy-looking kill machine Orman (Barry Keoghan; bleach-blond hair plus exposed roots = sociopath) to intercept Mike\u2019s next job and take him down.<\/p>\n

\"Crime\u2018Crime 101\u2019Amazon MGM Studios<\/p>\n

The three central male characters \u2014 Mike, Lou, and Orman \u2014 all converge on the archetype of the lone wolf, a dubious label the collaboration-shirking Lou has taken on in his precinct, and one his colleagues are decidedly over. Lou\u2019s personal life, meanwhile, is in shreds, and if you\u2019re looking to cast an actress as an embittered soon-to-be-ex who will read you your emotional rights in a diner booth over coffee, you know who to call: Jennifer Jason Leigh, who, in a brief but always welcome role, oozes unhappiness. The female characters are mostly malnourished, whether Lou\u2019s wife or Monica Barbaro as Mike\u2019s potential new flame, and in a role that is very much just someone\u2019s girlfriend (and Barbaro makes the best of her first big-screen part since \u201cA Complete Unknown\u201d earned her an Oscar nomination). The film at least mines some charm from a fender-bender as a meet-cute.<\/p>\n

But also woven into the mystery is Sharon (a potent Halle Berry), an insurance broker who is the victim of not just sexism but ageism, too, at her workplace. Her clients are typically LA\u2019s uber-wealthy (like a creepy Tate Donovan, who\u2019s here married to a teenager Sharon at first thinks is his daughter), so she knows not only where the high-priced diamonds from Antwerp are coming in and going out from, but also where the bodies are buried. Mike eventually links up with Sharon, who links up with Lou, who might be pumping her for information on how to get to Hemsworth\u2019s mercenary. <\/p>\n

Sharon, for whom the meditation-and-sleep app Headspace plays a regular soundtrack in her life whether in bed or in her car, enjoys a line of work that\u2019s also made her cannily perceptive about human nature: She knows that Mike, whom she\u2019s tasked with collecting \u201cwalkaway money\u201d for the both of them by stealing from her client, is a man with no friends, no family, no life of his own. Hemsworth makes his character\u2019s unreadability mostly compelling, even if the role is about as complex as an automatic car running on four-wheel drive.<\/p>\n

\"Crime\u2018Crime 101\u2019Amazon MGM Studios<\/p>\n

But Layton locates friction in other places, especially in Ruffalo\u2019s what-else-but grizzled turn as a shaggy, Raymond Chandler-type police detective. As shady and seedy as Layton\u2019s Los Angeles is here, \u201cCrime 101\u201d also manages to feel like something of a loving ode to the city itself: shot on location, making the case for bringing production back to this very cinematic City of Dreams (and sex, and drugs, and crime). Even as cheap shots of downtown LA\u2019s skid row try to jam in social context uneasily. Erik Wilson\u2019s cinematography suffers from a bout of what you might call Netflix (or in this case, Prime Video) lighting, undersaturated in the wrong places and often turning the nightscape into a dark void, not necessarily on purpose. <\/p>\n

Layton and his editorial team don\u2019t quite know how to cut all the pieces into an operatic, satisfying whole. An early car chase is indeed thrilling, as \u201cCrime 101\u201d understands how suspense is built from bumper-to-bumper heist sequences \u2014 with successive cuts that reveal information across different corners of the film\u2019s world \u2014 but the emotional stakes tend to be missing. Berry, though, gets a big crowd-pleasing moment toward the film\u2019s too tidily wrapped-up ending, walking away with what\u2019s as close to catharsis or redemption as anyone receives here. <\/p>\n

While \u201cCrime 101\u201d runs like a remodeled version of earlier, better heist movies from the \u201990s or early 2000s (which again are almost always coming from Michael Mann) but with lesser parts, there\u2019s enough gas in the tank and competence at the wheel to merit a spin. At least until \u201cHeat 2.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Grade: B-<\/p>\n

\u201cCrime 101\u201d opens in theaters on Friday, February 13, from Amazon MGM Studios.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zipping along the 101 freeway from downtown Los Angeles up to Santa Barbara, writer\/director Bart Layton\u2019s \u201cCrime 101\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":468619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,35655,191033,155343,75,1554,337,209],"class_list":{"0":"post-468618","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-chris-hemsworth","11":"tag-crime-101","12":"tag-david-koepp","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-film","15":"tag-movies","16":"tag-reviews"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/468619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}