Slick operators meet slick movie in Crime 101, a drama about capable people being pushed out of their comfort zones for our entertainment. It’s 21st-century film noir, to a large extent, Michael Mann in its glossiness and sexing-up of the city, utterly familiar in its set-up, less so in its payoff.
Bart Layton has made two feature films before, both with a strong documentary flavour. The Imposter was a full-on doc about one guy passing himself off as another, and everyone, including the replaced guy’s mother, somehow being taken in. The other, American Animals, used documentary elements to tell the story of an elaborate real-life heist. Both were remarkable. Layton edges more obviously into the realm of breathless fiction with this caper movie about three capable souls – Davis (Chris Hemsworth), the guy who plans cool, meticulous heists in which no one gets hurt; Lou (Mark Ruffalo), a rumpled cop with a maverick streak a mile wide; and Sharon (Halle Berry), the insurance executive who sells only to high-end clients.
Each has a psychological hang-up – Davis the broken childhood, Lou the marriage on the rocks, Sharon the dawning realisation that she’s about to be shafted by the company she’s given her life to – which primes them for recklessness. But it’s Barry Keoghan’s smalltime crook Ormon who catalyses all of them, an outsider malefactor who pushes the other three individuals into close proximity for the sort of off-kilter showdown you hope for in a crime thriller, and which Layton delivers.
Ormon is an anagram of Moron, and Keoghan plays this gun for hire as wired and feral, an idiot whose skills on a trailbike are a signifier of his lithium fizziness, his instability. When Ormon does a job, Layton makes sure we see how different it is from Davis’s sleekly planned operations. Really, it’s a surprise Ormon is still alive.
This is a movie full of lovely one-on-one scenes, when the crime dynamic pauses for a moment to allow something more personal to flourish. One of the best is the one where a female stranger runs into the back of Davis’s car – we assume it’s an accident, maybe it isn’t. When the two of them step out of their cars to exchange details, she realises he’s a hot dude and he realises she’s a babe and they both just stand there, struck dumb and unsure how to get out of the “insurance details” zone. It’s brilliantly written and played and reminds us again how good Monica Barbaro is – Joan Baez to Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.
Fate plays a role because this is noir and Ormon is fate’s agent, pushing the cop towards Davis at the same time as Davis is trying to recruit Sharon to be the inside woman on the job too far he probably shouldn’t take on.
Round the edges, Nick Nolte growls away as Money, Davis’s shadowy underworld backer, and Corey Hawkins is Tillman, Lou’s suited and booted smart sidekick, adding little flavour bombs without overwhelming the key characters.
Overhead shots of LA at night by DP Erik Wilson help reinforce the idea that there is a bit of homage to Michael Mann’s Collateral going on somewhere here. No bad thing. Here’s how you make a crime movie, the title Crime 101 cockily suggests, though in fact it refers to the fact that Davis’s heists all take place on US Route 101 rather than in a foundational college class. But this is how you make a crime movie – the known meets the unknown, planning meets chance, order meets chaos. It’s very nicely done.
Crime 101 – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
