Flasz On Film

Bart Layton remains one of those weirdly elusive filmmaking voices who would emerge from hiding every six-to-eight years and drop an absolute banger on the unsuspecting masses. Predominantly a documentarian whose attention had at least partially been on the development of the long-running series Banged Up Abroad, he first emerged with the award-winning, audacious and logic-bending doc The Imposter in 2012. He then came back in 2018 with American Animals, an outstanding post-modernist docudrama about a book heist that hybridized somewhere in between Reservoir Dogs and Fight Club and arguably one of the most intriguing movies of its year, and now he is back with Crime 101. This is Layton’s at his most mainstream and straightforward. But make no mistake—the movie still cooks on all burners.

Based on a novella by Don Winslow (also known for Savages) Crime 101 is at least on paper a rather typical crime affair. A high-class thief (Chris Hemsworth) looking for a way out of his trade, a grizzled cop (Mark Ruffalo) hoping to catch a break, a burnt out insurance executive (Halle Berry) going through a midlife identity crisis. Anyone who has ever watched a handful of gangster dramas or cop procedurals, or at least read a few paperbacks in this vein will be able to tell more or less how this story is going to shake down. It’s all broad strokes. All archetypes, baby. The thief cooks up his walkaway gig, the cop is closing in on him, and that insurance executive becomes an unwitting accomplice while an agent of chaos (Barry Keoghan) enters the fray at the orders of a grim-looking mafia boss played by Nick Nolte.

But as I remarked above, the magic of Crime 101 isn’t in the “what” of it all but in the “how” because the movie eschews its formulaic narrative origins. Not by way of reinventing the format of that cat-and-mouse procedural but rather by way of injecting adrenaline into the movie’s cardiovascular system and—crucially—by borrowing a page or two from one of the masters of the genre, Michael Mann himself. In fact, the filmmaker does not even attempt to disguise his motives here and wears his infatuation with Mann right on his sleeve, as the movie looks and feels quite a bit like a love letter to at least two of Mann’s seminal masterpieces, Thief and Heat, somehow coaxed to coexist under one roof for the 140 minutes that it takes for Crime 101 to run its course. A keen observer will most assuredly be able to pick out specific character tropes, motifs and ideas plucked out of Mann’s masterful crime movies: from the central idea of a thief who is the best at the game trying to get out of his trade and well-researched procedurality of events, all the way to that battle of wills we remember from looking at Vincent Hanna and Nick McCauley in Heat, not to mention some smaller points like the love interest and that fundamental concept of not becoming attached to anything you can’t walk away from in thirty seconds flat.

Consequently, Layton stages a highly polished mainstream cops-and-robbers action thriller that—while unable to come close to the level of Mann’s masterpieces, because frankly no movie ever could—will remind you how much fun it is to watch a movie that owns its inspirations, pays due homage to its overlords (it is definitely not a coincidence that Keoghan’s character looks and sounds like Ryan Gosling in The Place Beyond the Pines) and crafts a blood-curdling action spectacle. Filled with exhilarating car chases evocative of both Mann, Frankenheimer and Friedkin, suspenseful cat-and-mouse sequences and intricate set pieces with many moving parts that also happen to be firmly grounded in that Mann-esque realism as opposed to aspiring to high-class escapism in the vein of Mission: Impossible movies, Crime 101 is a well engineered blockbuster that knows which gods it prays to and, most importantly, has a very good idea about what used to make great action movies: depth and believability of its characters delivered without overwhelming the viewer with superfluous exposition.

It’s impossible not to care about the spectacle because Layton makes us feel invested in the pursuits of all three of the film’s leads to such an extent that when that final climax comes, we don’t even know whose corner we want to be in. We want all three of those people to get what they want… and that’s also by design, I believe. This is because underneath the blood-pumping chases and elaborate heist sequences Crime 101 has a few things to say that also—once again, crucially—remain in conversation with the characters. This is no mere crime thriller about good guys and bad guys, nor is it one where the bad guys are somehow good because of the tenacity of their character.

Driven internally by the much-explored themes relating to class division and wealth inequality in America, Layton uses the template of an action film to draw attention to the dire state of the world. He lingers and comments on unhoused encampments LA is peppered with and turns the entire affair into a de facto spiritual continuation of the Robin Hood myth. He makes us want for the thief to get away with it because of who he steals from, just as he makes us root for the cop whose own position at work is in peril because his values are not in sync with the corrupted ethos of other people in the force. Finally, he puts us in a position where we’d like to see Halle Berry’s character come out on top and for her disgraceful employers to get their comeuppance. Crime 101 is as much a cop versus robber film as it is a poor versus rich or a powerful versus powerless.

And to be perfectly honest, it’s always incredibly pleasurable to witness a movie that is as well-engineered as this one and also full of metatextual content to chew on: where action scenes evoke Mann’s iconic kineticism, where characters mean what they say and say what they mean and where a spectacle adds up to way more than the plot and story structure technically allow. Once again, Bart Layton has come out of hibernation and delivered a slick and incredibly accomplished movie. Mainstream and conventional as it is upon first glance, Crime 101 is definitely an early 2026 standout and a beautiful love letter to one of the masters of the genre.