Posts
“Crime 101,” though, adapted by Layton from Don Winslow’s novella of the same name, is not merely abut a cop and a robber but also a claims adjuster, Sharon, who does not come between the cop and the robber but instead becomes intertwined with them. I know, I know, a claims adjuster? But this is a glamorous claims adjuster, working for a high-end insurance firm and played by Halle Berry with a trove of statement jewelry. Then again, glamorous though she may be, we meet her botching a big meeting with a rich doofus (Tate Donovan, firmly in his rich doofus era) and the sleep app on her phone constantly taunts her for failing to get a good night’s rest. The latter is the germ of a good idea also briefly evoked in the schlub-like Lou taking up yoga that needed more follow through or to be dropped altogether given how Layton never quite decides if he is being sincere about the idea of wellness or sending it up.
Sharon might excel at reading people in her job, but she can’t quite read herself, stuck as a 53-year-old woman partner in an ageist, sexist firm with nowhere else to go. That is why when Mike seeks Sharon’s help in ripping off her place of employment, she is intrigued, evoking such drastic measures as the only means to security for a woman of a certain age, a plot point undergirded by Berry’s own career struggles with Hollywood ageism. This inside job could double as Sharon’s unlikely One Last Job, in other words, just as Mike is hoping to make it his One Last Job too, frequently referring to a financial number he has in mind that will set him up for life. He references this number in conversations with Maya, his kinda, sorta girlfriend, a truly thankless role into which Monica Barbaro at least manages to breathe some bright life. Mostly Maya is there to spotlight Mike’s emotional emptiness, and while Hemsworth fatally cannot make the turn to real emotion when that is eventually required, as if he has dug himself too big a stoical hole, he brilliantly plays a blank slate, emotions just bouncing right off him, sort of channeling, I swear to God, Kylie Sven Opossum in “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” (“Can you give me some kind of signal once in a while,” you can imagine Maya saying to him, “just so I know any of this is getting through to you?”)
In seeking to leave the criminal world behind, Mike is forced to break contact with his longtime fence (Nick Nolte), who enlists a younger and much more reckless thief, Ormon (Barry Keoghan), to take Mike’s scores and to take down Mike too. The part of Ormon is just a standard-issue antagonist, there to muck everything up and create some action scenes, but Keoghan’s malevolently kooky performance is also “Crime 101’s” most thrilling element. Keoghan takes his character repeating his dad’s mantra, “You have to break some eggs,” noticeably absent the part about also making an omelet, and running with it, playing the whole part like a guy running down the supermarket aisle of life, taking eggs from their cartons, breaking them, and leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. His jewel store robbery that goes wrong without entirely going wrong is weirdly, hilariously exhilarating.
True, during the big closing sequence in which Ormon sneaks his way into a hotel suite through a kitchen, you half expect to see him watching what is tantamount to the same scene from “Heat” on his smartphone as he does so, like an instruction manual, evoking the blatant and myriad parallels to Michael Mann’s 1995 ur-Los Angeles crime text. Surprisingly, however, “Crime 101” does not spiritually evoke “Heat” in the end so much as a noir version of another southern California epic, Lawrence Kasdan’s striving-to-be-great but just so-so “Grand Canyon” (1991) about the lives of disparate Los Angelenos intersecting. In “Crime 101,” three disparate Los Angelenos converge to get a leg up.
