Rob Reviews "Crime 101"

If I had to describe Crime 101 in one word, that one word would be… LONG.

Writer/director Bart Layton does his best to try and re-capture the success he had with American Animals in 2018, but this film just seems to want to be Heat so bad it can taste it.  Chris Hemsworth plays the enigmatic Mike, a jewel thief that is part Patrick Bateman, part conspiracy theorist whose capers are truly untraceable outside of a single pattern that is solely pursued by Lou (Mark Ruffalo), even to the dismay of his partner, Tillman (Corey Hawkins).  When Mike gets cold feet, his fencer, Money (Nick Nolte), enlists a young gun named Ormon (Barry Keoghan) to handle a heist Mike planned, creating a deadly rivalry that then focuses on the wedding of a very rich man (Tate Donovan) and a LOT of diamonds with the help of insurance policy writer Sharon (Halle Berry).  All the while, Mike looks for a normal life that he has started with Maya (Monia Barbaro), who he meets in a chance fender bender.

Sound confusing?  It kinda is.

There is SO much going on here with very little of it coming to a satisfying conclusion that I kept wondering why this film had to be almost two and a half hours long.  The first hour alone moves along at a pace that is akin to a turtle on an oil slick and meanders in minutiae on an epic level with characters that are so ancillary it was like Layton made a list of actors he wanted to work with and shoehorned them into this script with the force of Wile E. Coyote trying to launch a boulder at The Road Runner.  Even the motivations of most of these characters are pedestrian at best in a way that kept me constantly wondering how much more of this thing we had to go. 

And with all of that, I cannot say that this is a bad film; it’s just not a good film.  In an attempt to make an ensemble film full of action and mystery, Crime 101 comes off more jammed up than the freeway in California the trailer suggests is part of the plot.  However, when it has moments, those moments are very entertaining and fun to get to; the downside is that those moments are so few and far between that it keeps this film from being more than background noise from a streaming standpoint.

I would love for us to get back to a place where we normalize keeping movies inside the two-hour window without it being animated or international.  If you DO want my kidneys to float, give me a motivation for them to do so.  (Yes, I understand the concept of buying a smaller beverage, so don’t judge me.  LOL)  Given a cast that is this strong (also including Jennifer Jason Leigh and a brief appearance by the great Drew Powell), there is no reason for this to be as dull and slog-gy as Crime 101 is in the final analysis.