February 20, 2026

The governing conceit underpinning Bart Layton’s Crime 101 is that respectable life itself can feel like a form of deprivation and that middling careers and stagnant professional ceilings constitute sufficient cause to pursue illegality, provided it is executed with discipline – and that the victims themselves are rich.

This is the pitch — delivered as a sleezy business proposal — that Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth), a meticulous Los Angeles jewel thief, offers Sharon Combs (Halle Berry), an insurance underwriter whose affluent clients he intends to rob. “Zero risk and huge upside,” he assures her. “Nobody gets hurt — except maybe the shareholders of companies like yours.”

In deluded fashion, Davis frames his criminality as inevitability rather than avarice. Growing up poor, he explains, he “had no choices,” and bad influences simply followed. When Combs pushes back, citing honesty and hard work as the source of her success, he pivots to argue that her insurance employers are simply suited crooks. This is the sort of leftist moral framing that lionizes Che Guevara or Luigi Mangione.

Its questionable principles aside, Crime 101 is shot beautifully. Layton coats the film in a striking neo-noir palate, seeping nocturnal Los Angeles in the monochromatic amber-yellow headlights of busy streets. Layton invokes the aesthetics of Michael Mann’s heist-heavy LA from Heat (1995) but adapts it to a more modern era. Gone is the thrilling operatic violence and automatic machinegun fire; his robberies are quiet, clinical, and almost courteous. “It’s covered by insurance,” Mike Davis calmly tells victims while holding them at gunpoint. He also refuses jobs involving unnecessary risk: “Someone could get hurt,” he warns his fence (Nick Nolte), whose impatience introduces Barry Keoghan’s volatile Ormon into the operation.

Keoghan (from Saltburn) is especially well cast; Layton takes full advantage of his adroit knack for portraying menacing psychopaths. What he lacks in Davis’s righteousness and temperament (and more importantly, intelligence) he more than makes up for in eagerness and a penchant for violence. There is a genuinely menacing scene where he laments, “you saw my face,” to a victim he is pointing his gun at.  

Mark Ruffalo’s detective Lou (closely resembling his unkept role on HBO’s Task, and a reminder of Ruffalo’s talent when he’s not constrained by Bruce Banner and Marvel scripts) becomes Davis’s reluctant counterpart. He is visibly worn down by the wanton corruption he observes but is powerless to prevent. The only thing keeping him going is an intrigue with Mike Davis, whom he identifies through his patterns. He studies the thief with something approaching admiration, “He’s got rules and he sticks to them.”

Among the film highlights is an extended chase sequence where Davis pursues Ormon’s motorcycle through nighttime traffic and a pulsating musical score, intercut with Sharon Combs listening to a serene meditation audiobook encouraging her to, “let your heart open up to the presence of love.” It is a clever juxtaposition, and among Layton’s best moments.

The film’s contempt for the wealthy is almost as blunt as Ormon’s barbarism. Combs’s clients are exclusively dilletantes who treat art as either portfolio diversification or interior decoration: one collector proudly notes contemporary black art is “only going in one direction” (the only insight he was able to muster about the piece) while another admires a painting primarily for how well it matches her new chairs.

My other reservation is the film’s insistence that Chris Hemsworth is a socially awkward recluse. We are asked to believe he is so incapable of basic flirtation that he invites a woman who rear-ended his car to dinner by text, only to mumble his way through the evening without displaying a single discernible interest or personality trait. Hemsworth evades questions about work claiming he’s a software developer who “travels constantly for work.” Surely “consultant” would have been more believable. When his date, Monica Barbaro (charming as ever), asks whether he listens to music — of course he doesn’t — she produces a deep Springsteen cut, “Jersey Girl,” from the Live 1975–85 set. Enjoyable as the rarity may be, Barbaro’s entire character could vanish from the film without affecting the outcome, and the near two-and-a-half-hour runtime would be the better for it.

Bart Layton’s Crime 101 pays evident homage to Mann’s crime thrillers, though it ultimately falls short of those dizzying heights. Too often the film grows eager, glaringly giddy, in its contempt for the wealthy, veering into a childishness that undermines what might otherwise have been a fine thriller and leaves it uncertain who, exactly, its villain is.