‘Crime 101’ Review
Trying a little too hard to be ‘Heat.’
THERE’S A SHOT IN CRIME 101, the new heist-thriller from writer/director Burt Layton, that’s lifted directly from Michael Mann’s classic L.A. crime drama, Heat. Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth) pensively looks out of his beachfront home, the glass windows giving way to crashing waves, and you can feel him weighing his past, present, and future all at the same time. There’s a number in his head. When he reaches it he’s walking away. But he’s got to get there first, and getting there is the struggle.
It’s such a nice shot, Layton uses it again an hour or so later. And then a third time, with a different character. And look, I like seeing Michael Mann’s protagonists contemplate their future in front of a vast stretch of water—it works in Heat, Miami Vice, The Insider, and Manhunter to great effect—as well. But I’m not sure I like anything quite as much as Layton likes that particular vibe.
Crime 101 is a movie of vibes, the foremost vibe being “Los Angeleno Alienation.” This isn’t a particularly deep read on my part; at one point, Maya (Monica Barbaro), Mike’s girlfriend, says aloud that no one in Los Angeles would cheer for a song about L.A. like the audience in a live recording of “Jersey Girl” cheers for the shore at a Springsteen show.1 Los Angeles exists as something for the rest of the world to see and marvel at; the people who live there spend most of their time thinking about someplace else. It’s a land of strip malls and freeways and, yes, beaches.
The 101 is one of those highways; it runs up and the coast, a scenic rarity in a transportation scene dominated by concrete and brake lights and billboards. Mike has, over the last few years, pulled off a series of heists up and down this freeway. He is meticulous, leaving no trace: He scrubs himself of his skin flakes and hair follicles; he makes sure to snip the camera lines ahead of time so no one sees him. He doesn’t use violence, even when fired upon first, as he is in the opening sequence’s heist. And he flees to the 101, swapping cars as he goes in garages along the way.
It’s a series that has puzzled the cops; only detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo) has figured out there’s any sort of pattern at all. He’s as stumped as everyone else since the only clue tying the crimes together is that his suspect is good and technically proficient, so he starts looking for recent highline burglaries that have mystified him. Sadly, though, Lou is no Vincent Hanna, just as Mike is no Neil McCauley.
Crime 101 is one of those oddly paced movies that either needed to be twenty minutes shorter and lean into the high-concept, elevator-pitch nature of the idea or be twenty minutes longer and really dive into all the side characters, like the deranged and sloppy Ormon (Barry Keoghan) and the fence Money (Nick Nolte). Nolte in particular just kind of disappears from the film despite setting the third-act conflict into motion; one wonders if there isn’t a whole subplot involving Money and Mike’s relationship on the cutting room floor. Jennifer Jason Leigh, as Lou’s wife, also shows up for basically a single scene, in which she informs Lou that she’s been having an affair. It’s a genuine ‘Wait, what?’ moment, the sort of thing that again makes you feel like the movie is missing something.
We spend more time with Sharon Colvin (Halle Berry), an insurance adjuster who is aging up (and therefore out) of her gig as a high-end saleswoman assuaging the egos of billionaires, but she still feels tertiary to all the action, both integral to the schemes cooked up by Lou and Mike and also stuck on the outside looking in. For a movie that seems very concerned about the unfair treatment of women in an industry dependent on looks, she isn’t given much to do but look pretty, and that’s a problem. And I won’t spoil anything except to say that, ultimately, Layton is too forgiving of his lead characters: he likes them all too much and thus ends up giving them passes they don’t deserve, which is a problem for a movie so clearly modeled on something as remorseless as Heat.
I’m really leaning into the negative here, so I want to just say that I didn’t hate Crime 101. Layton knows how to direct a car chase, and there’s a vibrant kineticism that owes quite a bit to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, the last great car-chase movie. The score by Blanck Mass successfully apes a lot of the best parts of The Dark Knight (another movie that owes a lot to Heat). Keoghan is delightfully deranged as Ormon. And Hemsworth, Berry, and Ruffalo all deliver lived-in, believable performances. When it doesn’t drag, Crime 101 is entertaining enough.
But it feels as though the filmmakers were aiming for something a little higher than “entertaining enough” and didn’t quite get there. Pity.
I think it’s the recording from Live/1975–1985 but please do not hold me to that. It’s been a while since I listened to the last CD of that set.