Crime 101 is a 2026 crime thriller written and directed by Bart Layton, the filmmaker behind The Imposter and American Animals, adapted from Don Winslow's 2020 novella. It stars Chris Hemsworth as Mike, a disciplined jewel thief who stages his robberies along the 101 freeway in Los Angeles, Mark Ruffalo as Lou Davis, the dishevelled detective convinced he has found the pattern, Halle Berry as an insurance broker at a crossroads, and Barry Keoghan as Ormon, a violent motorcycle criminal hired to tail Mike and steal his scores. Nick Nolte, Monica Barbaro, Corey Hawkins and Jennifer Jason Leigh fill out a genuinely impressive supporting cast. It cost ninety million dollars and grossed roughly seventy-three million worldwide, which is to say it lost money, and I feel a certain kinship with that spreadsheet.

I want to be honest about my experience: this film bored me profoundly. That is the headline and everything else follows from it. The rhythm of the whole thing became almost comical after a while. Every so often, a flicker of action would break out and I would perk up, genuinely pleased, thinking we had finally arrived at the part where the film starts. And then it would simply stop. The energy would drain out of the scene and we would return to people talking quietly in cars and offices, until another brief flicker arrived twenty minutes later to raise and then dash my hopes all over again.

I should also correct something. I had it in my head that this ran two hours. It does not. It runs a hundred and forty minutes, which is two hours and twenty, meaning my original complaint was too generous by a full twenty minutes. That is a substantial amount of time to ask of an audience, and Layton uses it to linger, to breathe, to sit with his characters. In a film with more happening, that patience would be a virtue. Here it simply extends the wait.

I am fully aware that I am in the minority. Critical reaction to this has been strong, with a great many reviewers praising its craft, its cinematography, and its performances. The comparisons have been relentlessly to Michael Mann, with Heat, Thief and To Live and Die in LA invoked repeatedly. And that, I suspect, is the key to the whole phenomenon. I think a significant number of people wanted a modern Mann picture so badly that they have gone looking for depth in a film that mostly consists of beautifully photographed people standing in concrete spaces. One prominent review described it as a hangout movie that would work well as a spinoff television series, and I would argue that is an extraordinarily generous way of saying not very much happens.