“Crime 101” is an underworld drama that’s clever and compelling in unusual ways. It’s got a couple of car chases through Los Angeles that feel grippingly unchoreographed, as if the drivers really were figuring out at the last moment where to turn next, yet it’s not an action movie. The central character, Davis (Chris Hemsworth), is a jewel thief who specializes in meticulously targeted robberies that you could definitely call heists, though the film doesn’t have the trap-door blitheness of a “heist thriller.” “Crime 101” includes crime aplenty, but at heart it’s a character study — or, rather, four character studies wound into one. Based on a novella by Don Winslow (“Savages”), the film is just moody and intricate enough to feel the-Michael-Mann-of-“Thief”-adjacent, but it’s really a portrait of lost souls working to keep their heads in a corrupt world. Maybe that’s why “Crime 101” plays like a bit of a head game, in a way that may not do it any favors at the box office.
Yet I was held by how the film lets its actors make their mark. In the elaborate opening sequence, Davis steals some hot diamonds from a local jeweler and his assistants, which involves stopping them in cars and getting lucky enough to just be missed by a bullet fired from an ancient faulty pistol. Hemsworth plays this for maximum cool, and he’s good enough at it that for 10 minutes or so we’re wondering if he should be the next James Bond.
But then Davis meets up with his boss, Money, played by Nick Nolte with an old man’s jagged rasp as dramatic as his wry middle-aged intensity used to be. And we notice a fascinating quality just beneath Hemsworth’s stoicism. His Davis, with short dark hair and a beard and a glint of dread in his eye, is edgy and preoccupied, maybe even a bit nervous. About what? He’s a ruthless operator, but he isn’t fully at home in the world, or in his own skin. And it’s that quality of barely submerged anxiety that makes this one of Hemsworth’s best performances, and keeps the film arrestingly off balance.
Davis commits his robberies along the 101 freeway, and never harms anyone. That’s his pattern, and it’s one that Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), a smart LAPD detective, has picked up on. But how to catch him? Ruffalo, doughy and unshaven, with an unfashionable mound of gray-black curls, plays Lou as the Last Honest Cop in L.A., and what’s notable is the form the corruption around him takes. The LAPD, as the movie portrays it, has become a corporation, and the pressure to close cases is like the pressure to close deals; it leads to solving crimes at any cost. Lou, the old-school knight, with his grizzled “irrelevant” integrity, is viewed by his colleagues as a loser, a perception we’re invited to share when his long-time girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) dumps him.
Halle Berry, meanwhile, plays a winner trapped in the wrong industry. Her Sharon Coombs is a high-end insurance broker who hawks pricey policies to wealthy clients, sugaring her pitch with a hint of seduction. She’s been with her firm 11 years, but the old boys’ network keeps hedging on making her a partner. She has hit the glass ceiling with nowhere to turn, and Berry laces her vibrance with an undertow of anger that ripples into despair. That makes her a ripe partner for Davis, who needs a new source of potential marks, and also Lou, who she gets to know in yoga class. That Sharon is linked to both criminal and cop is one of those only-in-the-movies contrivances you just have to roll with. It’s a wobbly link, but Berry makes it emotionally credible.
The last major character is Ormon (Barry Keoghan), the thug hired by Nolte’s Money to terrorize his former protégé, and to make sure that any robbery ends with the money in the correct pocket (his). Keoghan plays most of his scenes hidden under a motorcycle helmet and biker’s jacket (much of the time, you can only see his eyes), and it’s a credit to the actor that his personality busts through anyway; it’s there in the brutish impatience of his movements.
The writer-director, Bart Layton, shoots L.A. with an expansive feel for its anonymous concrete nooks and crannies, and he takes his time (the movie runs two hours and 19 minutes), lingering on scenes like Davis’s first date with Maya (a charismatically sunny Monica Barbaro), who he meets when she backends his car, or Sharon’s encounters at the insurance office, a vipers’ nest where she’s starting to be overshadowed by a younger rival. What makes all of this work is that it’s the film’s way of coloring in the motivation for crime. Davis, raised as a foster child, is trying to construct an ordered world for himself. That’s why he’s such a cautious thief, controlled to a fault. He breaks with Money over the prospect of a Santa Barbara jewelry-store robbery he considers too risky — which doesn’t stop the loose-cannon Ormon from taking on the assignment and making a violent mess of it.
If the criminals in “Crime 101” are mostly more interesting than their crimes, the climactic robbery that unfolds in a suite of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel delivers the jolt of crazy danger we’ve been wanting. The scene is a layer cake of deception, with Davis impersonating the driver who has picked up the diamond carrier, and Lou impersonating the carrier (they have a great exchange about Steve McQueen), all building to a shootout designed to reveal the hidden core of every individual in the room. Taken as a thriller, “Crime 101” has its indulgences, but by the end it can stand as an advanced course in what underworld dreams are made of.