Zipping along the 101 freeway from downtown Los Angeles up to Santa Barbara, writer/director Bart Layton’s “Crime 101” 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.
The “Magnolia” of Michael Mann knockoffs — 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 — “Crime 101” is an effective, not to mention star-packed, thriller that mostly succeeds at what it’s trying to achieve, and directed by the guy who broke out big in 2012 with the mind-bending, true-crime impersonation documentary “The Impostor.”
The ensemble includes Chris Hemsworth, 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’s even as, creatively, this film feels like it’s hijacking at least 15 other, better movies, whether Mann’s “Heat” and “Collateral” or Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” or “Bullitt” with Steve McQueen, simply by the green shade of Hemsworth’s car.
What does not package “Crime 101” 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.
To boil it down, the film’s 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 “Blackhat,” and absolutely not because he played Thor). His string of heists up and down the 101 has left Detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo, ever these days playing an alcoholic, a divorcée, or a cop, and here he’s 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’s next job and take him down.
‘Crime 101’Amazon MGM Studios
The three central male characters — Mike, Lou, and Orman — 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’s personal life, meanwhile, is in shreds, and if you’re 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’s wife or Monica Barbaro as Mike’s potential new flame, and in a role that is very much just someone’s girlfriend (and Barbaro makes the best of her first big-screen part since “A Complete Unknown” earned her an Oscar nomination). The film at least mines some charm from a fender-bender as a meet-cute.
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’s uber-wealthy (like a creepy Tate Donovan, who’s 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’s mercenary.
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’s also made her cannily perceptive about human nature: She knows that Mike, whom she’s tasked with collecting “walkaway money” 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’s unreadability mostly compelling, even if the role is about as complex as an automatic car running on four-wheel drive.
‘Crime 101’Amazon MGM Studios
But Layton locates friction in other places, especially in Ruffalo’s what-else-but grizzled turn as a shaggy, Raymond Chandler-type police detective. As shady and seedy as Layton’s Los Angeles is here, “Crime 101” 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’s skid row try to jam in social context uneasily. Erik Wilson’s 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.
Layton and his editorial team don’t quite know how to cut all the pieces into an operatic, satisfying whole. An early car chase is indeed thrilling, as “Crime 101” understands how suspense is built from bumper-to-bumper heist sequences — with successive cuts that reveal information across different corners of the film’s world — but the emotional stakes tend to be missing. Berry, though, gets a big crowd-pleasing moment toward the film’s too tidily wrapped-up ending, walking away with what’s as close to catharsis or redemption as anyone receives here.
While “Crime 101” runs like a remodeled version of earlier, better heist movies from the ’90s or early 2000s (which again are almost always coming from Michael Mann) but with lesser parts, there’s enough gas in the tank and competence at the wheel to merit a spin. At least until “Heat 2.”
Grade: B-
“Crime 101” opens in theaters on Friday, February 13, from Amazon MGM Studios.
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