Chris Hemsworth as Davis in Crime 101 [Dean Rogers © 2025 Amazon MGM Studios]

CRIME 101
Directed by Bart Layton
Certificate: 15
☆☆☆☆

LOS Angeles has always offered a stage set for the juxtaposition between for-sale dreams and hard reality.

James M Cain captured it perfectly in his hard boiled novels: he saw how the impact of oil money, married to the glitz built on broken fantasies created by Hollywood, made it a perfect maelstrom for the criminally attracted. And it has been a returning theme for the movie industry – such films as LA Confidential make the city an exhausted character with corrupt authorities working with corrupt businessmen, where getting rich quick is the be all and end all, where material acquisitions are deemed the product of a purposeful life.

With this assembled cast of highly watchable characters, this crime thriller fights to reveal what this City of fallen Angels is really all about. It is not pretty.

Crime 101 is a clever crime caper, with the classic twists so beloved of detective tales.

Chris Hemsworth’s lead is, on first glance, living the California dream – a flash car, expensive watch, well groomed, quite the catch. But Davis is a high-end jewels thief who targets couriers.

Detective Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo) is a deadbeat detective, under pressure from his boss for bringing down the rate of solved crimes, with what colleagues feel is an unhealthy fixation on a theory based around heists that have taken place near the 101 freeway that snakes up the cost.

Then there is another stick-up kid on the block: Ornan (Barry Keoghan) is a ruthless, gun-toting nihilist who, unlike Davis’s careful plot planner, is only going to go in, all sounds blazing to take what is rightfully not his. Sharon (Halle Berry) is an insurance saleswoman, who is pawed at by Brologarchy filthy rich pests, and overlooked for promotion by her smarmy boss. All come together at breakneck speed.

A reliance on moody orchestral arrangements to denote something nasty is about to happen feels a bit too cop drama cliché to have the tension building impact it wants. But that’s a minor distraction – the streets of LA, with their car clogged lanes, the homeless shanty towns that create a California John Steinbeck would recognise, are brilliantly depicted.

This is a city of greed and corruption, a place fuelled by gasoline and a lust for money – a morally bankrupt world where the good guys have to walk through a valley of temptation to eventually do the right thing.