'Crime 101' is 'Heat' in the Age of Loneliness

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\Crime 101 is the perfect mid crime movie for the loneliness epidemic, a modern version of Heat in which everyone hates their jobs and mostly just wants to make a friend.

Chis Hemsworth plays “Mike” (later we learn his name isn’t actually Mike), a big, sad thief who in the first scene almost gets his head blown off by one of the two diamond couriers he robs before speeding away in his big black muscle car. Mike speeds away on, you guessed it, the 101 freeway, the only connection between a string of high-end robberies in which no one gets hurt.

The only guy who has managed to put this together so far is Detective Lou, played by Mark Ruffalo—the best actor on Earth at playing characters who slept in their clothes. Is he playing basically the same role here as in Task? Yes. Am I thrilled about that? Also yes. No one at the department takes Lou’s theories all that seriously, because just look at him. He’s so rumpled! A real Ruffalo type, if you will. You know beyond the shadow of a doubt that this man is divorced, or about to be. When he shows up to the first scene, Lou’s partner (played by Corey Hawkins) begs him to get a newer car. “Aw, but I like old stuff,” Lou mutters, drinking bad coffee from a tin can he rummaged from the garbage after chasing off a goat.

Is it preposterous to center the story of a brilliant, high-end professional thief around the idea that this same meticulous thief has a favorite freeway? (“A shipment of priceless emeralds? Sorry, no can do, mate, dossier says the handoff takes place at the 10/710 junction”) Absolutely, but many of the best pulpy crime flicks are built around similarly silly conceits. It’s almost a contest to see which screenwriter can invent the dumbest one. The first Fast and Furious had street racers shooting semi trucks with grappling hooks so they could steal some DVDs.

Conceit aside, the biggest question about the opening robbery is how Mike knew that the diamonds in the briefcase were decoys, and that the real one were in the courier’s socks. The answer, in a very indirect, roundabout sort of way, comes to us in the person of Sharon (Halle Berry), a high-end insurance agent trying to stay sexy and alluring enough that her rich idiot clients will want her to write their policies. All while her sexist bosses (Paul Adelstein, doing a brilliantly skeevy Brett Ratner impression) minimize her work and keep shining her on about a promotion. Would you believe that she’s also lonely?

If Heat was about obsession, the kind of obsession that makes cops and thieves two sides of the same coin, Crime 101 is about precarity. Some people become cops, some become thieves, and some people become insurance agents, but all of them have shitty bosses and lives made lonely by the exhausting pursuit of stability. Crime 101—adapted by Bart Layton from a 2020 Don Winslow novella—is no Heat, certainly, but it’s not without its meat-and-potatoes charms, either. It doesn’t offer many luxury features but it’s decent at the basics. Like finding whatever it is in Chris Hemsworth’s eyes that makes you want good things to happen to him, even if he’s not so outwardly charismatic. I even minded his American accent less than I ever have before. I still think it’d be a lot easier and better to just let Chris Hemsworth characters sound Australian, but he deserves credit for the improvement.

Big, lonely Mike eventually meets a nice girl, Maya (Monica Barbaro from the Bob Dylan movie, though I only just now made that connection). They try to get to know one another, lonely as they are, though Mike’s job makes that hard. All his responses to Maya’s questions come out confounding or infuriatingly vague. His paths to financial security (crime) and emotional fulfillment (this relationship) are directly at odds, and so he ends up in this confusing middle ground. Sometimes it do be like that. His real name isn’t even Mike.