This story contains minor spoilers for Crime 101, including the reason it's called Crime 101.
We may have, as a culture, reached peak Heat. Michael Mann’s seminal “Los Angeles crime saga” turned 30 last December, and alongside various anniversary appreciations, news about potential casting for the adaptation of Mann’s sequel/prequel novel Heat 2, and the deathless GREAT ASS! GIF (rest in power, the “Ferocious, aren’t I?” follow-up line removed from the director’s edition!), we have the greatest of all tributes to a movie’s lasting legacy: Other movies that very obviously wish they were that earlier movie. Den of Thieves, commonly known as Dirtbag Heat, got the ball rolling back in 2018, closer to the original film’s 25th anniversary, but compared to Crime 101, Thieves is just a dirtbag who has maybe seen Heat twice. It’s easy to picture Crime 101 director Bart Layton, on the other hand, watching Heat a normal amount of times (at least ten).
To be fair, Crime 101 has other things than Heat on its mind—things like Michael Mann’s Thief, Michael Mann’s Collateral, and Michael Mann’s Blackhat. The nerds may point out that the movie’s central criminal with a code and cop whose personal life is falling apart are played by Thor and the Hulk, productively teamed up in Thor: Ragnarok among other Marvel movies. Real ones, however, will fixate on how Crime 101 pits the criminal with a code from Blackhat against the disheveled cop from Collateral, and assigns them roles that share some details with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in, well, you know.
Give Chris Hemsworth some credit, though: In Crime 101, his Mike Davis—a lone-wolf jewel thief who executes exacting and zero-fatality heists, typically by slickly replacing a courier’s security detail—isn’t an exact replica of his Blackhat character, nor is he a simple De Niro fugazi. Because his opening demo of a heist scene is so quietly electric, it takes a little while to scan that Mike is kind of a rise-and-grind blank slate with a touch of tech-bro social ineptitude. That comes out most fully in a charming scene where he gets into a minor fender-bender with Maya (Monica Barbaro)—or, in Heat-speak, an Amy Brenneman type—and he can barely exchange information like a human. In place of that hilarious De Niro brusqueness (“Lady, why are you so interested in what I do?”) is the goofy discomfort of someone a solid two decades younger than Hemsworth’s actual age. (He seems to be playing younger than his 42 years here, but still.) Mike also recalls the fastidious, grim-faced hero of David Fincher’s The Killer, not least when he’s scraping off stray skin flakes and hairs before his job, so he can leave as little trace as possible. Somehow this aspiration to invisibility does not extend to his squealing-tires driving style.
Mike has his eyes on making some unspecified (but extremely large) amount of money before he can walk away from the game. He doesn’t seem to be in any rush; Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo) may be the only cop on the entire LAPD convinced that a series of ultimately nonviolent robberies that trace the path of the 101 freeway—yes, thank God, Crime 101 is a clever-stupid title, not a stupid-stupid one—have all been committed by the same smooth operator. The movie isn’t quite a duel between Mike and Lou; it also follows Sharon (Halle Berry), an insurance broker whose client becomes a big-money target for Mike, and Ormon (Barry Keoghan), a younger and far sloppier criminal who takes over a job that Mike pragmatically abandons and gets a taste for his scores.
The attempt at L.A.-style sprawl is what sets Crime 101 apart from other Heat-derivative works like Den of Thieves, which mainly adapted Mann’s division of cops and crooks into substantial, almost sports-like teams. Crime 101, like Heat, remembers that women exist, although putting them at the center of the action is not on either film’s agenda. But Berry gets more scenes to herself, from her point of view, than any of the Heat ladies, as Sharon grows increasingly frustrated with her stagnating job’s refusal to promote her further. Berry is prone to overacting, noisy even when her character stays silent, but with Hemsworth at an intentionally low boil and Ruffalo doing some anti-glam shambling, her expressiveness in these scenes makes them pop surprisingly well, considering they’re interrupting what should be the more exciting business of planning jewel heists at the behest of a raspy Nick Nolte (he plays Mike’s fence, though he recedes from the movie by around the halfway point). Barbaro, too, makes an impression through sheer anti-machismo charm.
Maybe, though, these charismatic actresses given admittedly stock material make such a strong impression in Crime 101 because the movie has its fair share of downtime. That’s the Heat sprawl that Layton’s movie ultimately misses; its 140-minute runtime flirts with crime epic only to play more like a distended miniseries with questionable time-management skills. For a stretch, the most suspenseful scenes in the movie are Mike’s dates with Maya, because despite the Heat-snatched dynamic, there’s some genuine held-breath uncertainty over whether our man will say the wrong thing and hasten Barbaro’s exit from the picture. Please don’t leave us alone with Mike! He’ll make it so weird!
Hemsworth is still pretty good in the role; in what may be a reaction to the flop of Blackhat (solid movie, to be clear), his stoicism is less glorified this time, and tempered by his fumbling attempts at intimacy. Mike is also framed as a Los Angeles native who sees more decay and deprivation than some of the other characters; maybe that’s from the Don Winslow source material, but it’s still an interesting point for an English writer-director to zoom in on, especially at the expense of a bigger heist-movie payoff.
Despite a lack of last-act fireworks, with a final robbery more prolonged than exciting, Crime 101 hangs in there and gets the job done, with less macho showboating than Den of Thieves. What ultimately makes it such an instant comfort-watch isn’t really its Mann parallels; it’s hard to think of much it does as well as any given Mann crime picture (yes, even Blackhat), especially in the realm of style. Layton has a cleaner approach to digital cinematography than we’ve seen in Mann’s later-period efforts, which have leaned into its uncanny (what Vincent Hanna might call “dead tech”) qualities. The overhead shots of the L.A. freeway at night, enticing as they are, are pure Diet Mann. Little about the movie ever feels truly nocturnal. But Layton has some of his own tricks, like clever transitions between characters—Mike and Maya leave a fancy restaurant to go someplace more accessible, and Layton cuts to a diner menu… perused by Lou and his about-to-be-ex (Jennifer Jason Leigh, in the movie’s most thankless role)—and scene-overlapping soundtrack cues whose source isn’t immediately clear.
If the guys played by Hemsworth and Ruffalo register as neither fully dimensionalized humans nor instant-classic archetypes, well, maybe that’s part of the Crime 101 schematics; maybe that “101” designation does have the more basic meaning after all. The movie fails to touch the existential grandeur of Heat, and there’s honor in that. It shows up to the multiplex anyway, in the face of declining older-adult admissions, ready to serve as your grown-up entertainment and walk away with its head held high when it doesn’t make as much as a YouTuber’s pet project. That’s the discipline.