Crime 101 is sleek like a Michael Mann venture, but with a healthy dose of 2020s nihilism. We can relish it as a return to the mid-budget thriller, with its marquee of stars – Chris Hemsworth, Halle Berry, Mark Ruffalo and Barry Keoghan – and its deployment of LA as a steel and sun-dappled chessboard, without pickling ourselves in our own nostalgia. It’s hardly timid in its references, but it’s never confined by them either.
It takes a moment for writer-director Bart Layton – a documentarian working here for the first time in pure fiction by adapting a Don Winslow novella – to pin down his story. There are four major players and, at first, they intersect only by periodically passing each other on the 101 freeway. Mike Davis (Hemsworth) is a jewel thief with a conscience, who methodically strikes his targets along the 101, but abhors violence.
