Quick Synopsis: A master thief and an insurance broker join forces for a big heist, while a determined detective pursues them to prevent the multi-million dollar crime.

Thoughts Going In: This should be slick, fun, and may end up being one of the most fascinating films I’ve seen all year

Sometimes I write reviews the day I see the film, so it’s fresh in my mind. If it’s a Netflix movie, I may write parts of it while watching it. Crime 101, I watched over a week ago. If I wrote it soon after, this may have been kinder. It’s not that the flaws have made themselves known (like they did the further I got away from IT: Chapter 2), or that horrific things have been revealed (like how the main character in The Penguin Lessons turned out to be a sexual predator). It’s just that, being a week removed from the experience of watching it, this is a difficult film to feel any enthusiasm about.

It’s not a bad movie, far from it. It’s just incredibly pedestrian (which is ironic for a film so heavily focused on cars). It’s clear that the director Bart Layton is a big fan of films like Heat, and this is the closest to that we’ve seen for a while. But we have seen it before. Although if you are going to make a film like this, you could do worse than borrowing from the best.

What Crime 101 does well, it does very well. It looks great, the performances are fantastic, and all three of the main characters have clear motivations. Barry Keoghan’s character of Ormon was less convincing. Not the performance, the performance was great. But the character? The character would have been caught much earlier on. Hemsworth’s character (Mike) is meticulous, doing everything possible to make sure he’s not caught, very deliberately not leaving any DNA evidence, or using violence. Ormon is less careful. It feels like almost every single scene starts with him taking off a mask to show his face, even whilst on camera.

The main issue is one of length. It’s 140 minutes, and it doesn’t deserve it. It doesn’t do anything near enough with its story to justify that length. It’s not interesting enough to keep you emotionally invested throughout. The romance subplot is one that could definitely be cut. Especially since the meetcute is “she drives her car into his”. There’s something about the whole bit which feels fake. It seems like it exists to tell us how lonely his life is. There are definitely more efficient ways of doing that. The section on Wikipedia for Plot is 538 words long. Here’s every mention of that character:

The lonely Mike strikes up a romance with a stranger, Maya, after she rear-ends his car.

Wary of Mike’s secretive nature, Maya ends their relationship after he reveals he will be leaving town.

Mike sends Maya a childhood photo, asking her for a second chance.

Completely unnecessary, although it has to be said that the character is played well by Monica Barbaro. I’d like to see her and Hemsworth lead a low-budget romcom, but I don’t want that romcom to be in the middle of a crime drama. There are times when it feels like Crime 101 lacks ambition; being perfectly content to give you the basics. Which would be fine if it didn’t have a $90million budget.

Budget does affect how you view a film. Not just action movies, even romantic comedies starring big names have higher expectations than ones with lesser-known actors. If the budget was smaller for this, I would commend it. But a budget this big, with actors this well known? It can’t afford to be as generic and forgettable as this is.