The comparisons to Heat practically make themselves. A cat-and-mouse caper centered around a meticulous career thief (Chris Hemsworth) and the dogged detective on his trail (Mark Ruffalo), Bart Layton’s Crime 101 is nothing if not a part of a lineage of cold, process-oriented thrillers. But this adaptation of the Don Winslow short story of the same name is distinct enough to stand on its own two legs, equally a pleasurable recall of 1970s and 80s Los Angeles crime fiction as a novel reflection of the city’s brimming wealth divide.
Crime 101 cooks low and slow, like a stew on the back burner whose ingredients thicken and coalesce at almost imperceptible levels. It’s unusual for a major studio film these days to take its time, but that may be the film’s most appealing element. This is a purposefully languid movie that proves real, genuine tension can be built without crash landing right on your head. In an era of fast cuts and escalating explosions — the kind that Hemsworth, Ruffalo and Halle Berry all know intimately from their time in Marvel’s universe — it is refreshing to watch something this confident in its own particular DNA.
Crime 101 Pleasurably Throws Back to an Era of Click-Clacking Process-Oriented Thrillers
Confidence, as it happens, is not something that comes easy to Mike Davis. Playing directly off his own public image of Thor, the brash, ridiculous superhero of the MCU, Hemsworth plays Mike like a shut-in. Avoiding eye contact at all costs and apparently so unused to speaking to women that he resorts to frequent visits with an escort service, Mike is a man whose expertise has been developed as a consequence of his inability to function socially. In contrast with much of the heist genre’s previous leading characters, Mike is neither smooth nor arrogant, but perpetually nervous and short of breath.
Mike has been on a run of high-end jewel thefts, all of which happen at locations up and down the California coastline in proximity to the 101 freeway. His code of ethics is such that he lives little to no pattern of behavior, but Detective Lou Lubesnick (Ruffalo) suspects that this recent spate of cold cases could be attributable to one person. The LAPD strongly disagrees. Actually, they just refuse to take it seriously at all, for fear that it will cause a significant drop in their closure records.
Lubesnick is very much Mike’s opposite. A slovenly, unambitious investigator who covers up his disappointment in life with chain-smoking and constant self-deprecation, Lubesnick is a man who has clearly been beaten down by a police system which prizes loyalty over genuine police work. There are implications that he has refused to “play the game,” a reproach of both capitalism’s reach into public service and the police’s predilection for self-protection.
After Mike just barely survives a job, he starts to approach his work with more caution, telling his boss, Money (Nick Nolte) that he wants to back out of a planned heist of a shop in Santa Barbara. Money responds by covertly hiring Ormon (Barry Keoghan) to do the job instead, which in turn sparks a long dynamite fuse that brings Mike, Lubesnick, Ormon and Sharon (Berry), an insurance salesperson to the ultra-wealthy, to its inevitable explosion.
For all of these characters, Mike’s early brush with death becomes a collective wake-up call that their individual assumptions about what constitutes success may be misguided. Embedded in Layton’s caper is a rebuke of financial ambition as the be-all and end-all to happiness, which admittedly is a bit of a hard message at a time of great economic disparity. It doesn’t always work in that way, and Layton spends a bit too much time trying to sell it as well as Mike’s budding relationship with Maya (Monica Barbaro).
For one thing, Mike is such a blank canvas that watching Maya convince herself of his positive qualities feels a bit silly. Hemsworth is very good here, but his character is not just hard to read, he’s pretty much empty, taking caginess to an all-new level when he cannot even mention a single musical artist he likes to listen to. It is to the actor’s credit that we believe him nonetheless. All four leads are playing extremely well off of each other and off of themselves, with Keoghan especially Keoghan-like as yet another slimy, creepy, alien-like menace.
If nothing else it is extremely exciting to have an original crime film in the vein of New Hollywood’s best.
But it is through Berry that the film works best as a treatise on the appeal of breaking the order of traditional rules and guidelines. A high-end tried-and-true capitalist, her devotion to work has come at the cost of having very little personal life and yet, for all of her success, she is treated with abject misogyny by her bosses. As she is brought closer to Mike’s orbit, Berry beautifully brings us along on the ride of someone whose entire understanding of themselves and of the world is crumbling faster than an overbaked cookie.
Crime 101 works more often than it doesn’t, and if nothing else it is extremely exciting to have an original crime film in the vein of New Hollywood’s best. Between its abject refusal to capitulate to conventional expectations and its deliberate pace, there is indeed a lot here to learn from. That’s filmmaking 101.
Crime 101 opens theatrically on February 13th, 2026.
- Release Date
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February 13, 2026
- Runtime
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140 Minutes
- Director
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Bart Layton
- Writers
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Bart Layton, Peter Straughan
- Producers
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Derrin Schlesinger, Eric Fellner, Shane Salerno, Tim Bevan, Chris Hemsworth, Ben Grayson, Dimitri Doganis, Bart Layton