Crime 101: A Review For People Who Saw The Movie
Starring Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Barry Keoghan, and Halle Berry.
The lovely and somewhat talented Chris Hemsworth, plays a former homeless kid made good. He steals from jewelry thieves, insurance fraudsters, and tax evaders, but he’s never hurt anyone. We know this because the lovely and talented, Detective Mark Ruffalo says, “He’s never hurt anyone.”
That four-word flash of explicit empathy and tacit respect is when I knew Hemsworth was going to somehow save Ruffalo’s life shortly before the credit roll.
Hemsworth, who has meticulous systems, does not need to get work from Nick Nolte, who plays his behind-the-scenes scary guy. Nolte doesn’t scare me at all. It’s not that old people don’t scare me. Mom is 89 and scares me plenty.
The high bar for portraying a behind-the-scenes scary guy was set sixteen years ago by Pete Postlethwaite’s portrayal of Fergie in The Town. When Ben Affleck killed Fergie it made you happy because Fergie deserved to die. In Crime 101, Nolte deserves to be arrested, released on bail pending trial, convicted, and sentenced to house arrest at the local Old Fools Home. He does not deserve to die, he doesn’t die, and we don’t care.
The presence of Nolte’s character is a logic hole. Thing is the entire story arc hangs on the fact that Hemsworth never hurt anyone. To get there we need Hemsworth to have a falling out with Nolte, so Nolte can promptly replace him with Berry Keoghan, who has zero systems and recklessly hurts everybody, including the lovely and talented, and I’m going with, post-menopausal, Halle Berry, who is really into yoga.
Every institution in Crime 101 is rotten to the core, which is to say it could have been a documentary. The LAPD is bad apples but for Ruffalo. The insurance company is ageist, sexist, and racist. When Berry fails to close a rich guy on a new policy, she loses the account to a white, much younger version of herself. Berry was willing to suck it up and play the part of billionaire bait, until she was ultimately blown off for a long-promised promotion to equity partner.
That’s when Berry takes Hemsworth up on his first freelance offer to collaborate on shaking down Berry’s former billionaire client for $11 million in cash and diamonds. Fortunately for the plot, Ruffalo’s wife has had all the good cop she can handle, matter-of-factly confessing to multiple affairs over diner burgers, which makes Ruffalo a victim at home as well as at work.
What would you do? Think carefully because first prize is the Cadillac. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired. Now, ring the bell if you said, “Move to the beach and take yoga with Halle Berry!”
We already hate the billionaire whose fiancée looks like her legal status changed to Post-Epstein as recently as Tuesday. If that’s not enough, this billionaire is cheap, resorting to tax fraud and money laundering in connection with the measly $5 million in diamond parting gifts he pulls together for members of the wedding party.
True to form, Keoghan, the guy who hurts everyone, shoots and wounds the billionaire. When the fiancée finds out her future husband is cheap she yells something like, “You Asshole!”, thereby wounding the billionaire a second time. Keoghan shoots Ruffalo in what turns out to be his bulletproof police vest. The shot could well have been fatal but for the fast thinking Hemsworth, who breaks character by finally and fatally hurting Keoghan who definitely had it coming.
All of this is to say, “Great popcorn movie!”