Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | April 7, 2026
Crime 101 came out in the United States on Valentine’s Day weekend. It has a hell of a cast: Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Halle Berry, Barry Keoghan, Monica Barbaro, Nick Nolte, Corey Hawkins, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It was poorly marketed. The title is bad. The trailer felt generic. The movie poster was terrible. It made $36 million domestically on a $90 million budget. But I still had a feeling about it, and I thought to myself something I’ve been thinking a lot more over the past few years: “Man, I cannot wait to see that … when it hits streaming.” I marked it down on my streaming spreadsheet and awaited its arrival. I figured I’d review it when it hit Prime Video because that’s when most people are going to watch it, anyway (it’s the top movie on Amazon this weekend).
That feeling was right, too. It’s slick, entertaining, well-acted, and reasonably intense, but there’s nothing particularly special or unique about it that makes it worthy of the theatrical experience. That’s OK. It’s the perfect streaming movie. Director Bart Layton (American Animals) does his best Michael Mann impression, and if you’re going to rip off Mann, you can hardly do better than adapting source material from one of the best crime fiction writers working, Don Winslow. And it’s so much better than most movies made for streaming — it’s a theatrical castoff. AMC Theaters’ trash is your living room’s treasure.
Chris Hemsworth plays Mike, an intensely disciplined jewel thief. He’s meticulous about planning, he always commits his heists near the 101 in Los Angeles, and no one ever gets hurt. When he backs out of a robbery that carries too much risk, his fence, Money (Nick Nolte), lines up a psychotic, chaos-drunk motorcycle thief named Ormon (Barry Keoghan) to not only take his place but to tail Mike and steal the loot from his future jobs.
Meanwhile, Mark Ruffalo plays Det. Lou Lubesnick, a down-on-his-luck cop with a bad mustache who has been chasing the 101 robber for years. He works for a corrupt police force more interested in pinning these robberies on the wrong people and padding their clearance rate than in admitting there’s a serial thief in their midst. Lou won’t let it go.
When Mike meets a woman, Maya (Monica Barbaro), and starts planning his walk-away heist, things spiral. That heist involves an insurance agent to the obscenely wealthy, Sharon (Halle Berry), and what Mike, Sharon, and Lou all seem to share is a deep contempt for rich pricks.
You can see where Crime 101 is headed from a mile away, but it doesn’t make the journey any less enjoyable. Sometimes it’s enough to sit back, relax, and watch a well-made, well-acted heist film with a few nods to Steve McQueen, a good-guy thief, and a good-guy detective working toward the same end. It’s a shame that Amazon swallowed up MGM and all, but every so often, we get a $90 million theatrical disappointment that lights up our big-screen televisions and our laptops. I ain’t mad at it — not if it means watching an old-fashioned heist flick on a Saturday night for the price of free shipping on toilet paper you buy in bulk once a month.
