By Peter Keough

With its briskly intoxicating style, narrative aplomb, and masterful performances, this film transforms pulpy material into a gripping entertainment with a satisfying, social justice subtext.

Crime 101. Directed by Bart Layton based on the novella by Don Winslow. At the Boston Common, the Causeway, the South Bay Center, the Kendall Square, and in the suburbs.

Davis (Chris Hemsworth, right) and Lou (Mark Ruffalo, left) in Crime 101.

One last heist, a crafty master criminal and his hot-headed rival, a veteran cop with domestic problems, a femme fatale – true to its title, Don Winslow’s sparsely written novella, Crime 101 reads like a movie treatment for a generic hardboiled thriller. But with its briskly intoxicating style, narrative aplomb, and masterful performances Bart Layton’s adaptation transforms this pulpy material into a gripping entertainment with a satisfying, social justice subtext.

It starts out, however, trying a bit too hard, with a gratuitously flamboyant parallel-edited sequence. An upside-down, blurry image of LA is further confused with the addition of a woman’s voice droning New Agey feel-good encomiums. Listening to the guff is Sharon Coombs (Halle Berry, who triumphs in a role vindicating all 50+ year-old women putting up with sexist assholes). Once again, she is suffering from a poor night’s sleep before having to go into the office to sell insurance to vulgar rich people. Intercut with her morning ritual are the parallel routines of Lou Lubesnik (a befuddled and crafty Mark Ruffalo in full Columbo mode), an LAPD detective, and Mike Davis (as played by Chris Hemsworth, imposing, proficient, and damaged), a jewel thief trying to add one more score to his impressively planned, impeccably executed, bloodless robberies.

It doesn’t quite go as planned, however, and ends in a chaotic, dynamically edited Bullitt-like car chase that he barely escapes from. (The Steve McQueen references, rife in the original, are here managed with deft and effective discretion). But there are repercussions. His nerves have grown more frayed and this is noticed by his fence and groomer Money (Nick Nolte, with a voice from the depths and looking like a cross between Jorge Luis Borges and Joe Biden). Davis begs off the next job, which the cynical Money passes on to the flamboyantly loose-cannon Ormon (Barry Keoghan, an endearing psychopath with his creepy little eyes), who favors a bug-like helmet, uses an annoying motorbike, and shows far less restraint and finesse than Davis as he nearly bungles the caper.

This caper throws off Lubesnik, who has been infuriating the rest of the department with his theory about the recent spate of unsolved jewel thefts. They are all by the same guy, he insists, because they all take place near California’s coastal Highway 101 and all have the same MO. Most notably they involve no violence (Davis even returns the victims’ cell phones), and the perpetrator has never been caught. The latest job, though, with its gratuitous brutality and panicky clumsiness, seems out of character.

Davis, meanwhile, has moved on. Dogged by potential police pressure and the doppelganger-like stalking of Ormon, he has changed his car from one photogenic, classic American speedster to another and moved his residence to another soulless, pre-furnished beachfront apartment. He also meets Maya (a nuanced performance in an underwritten role by Monica Barbaro), who notices that he has no family pictures or other personal items in the décor. Her persistent and compassionate questioning starts to draw out some of Davis’s backstory: he was raised and brutalized in foster homes, one of which overlooked Highway 101, and is determined to get enough money to never have to be a hostage to fate — or to those with wealth and power — again.

So, it makes sense that he prowls the 101 environs and that his targets are essentially the insurance companies: “Don’t die for the insurance companies,” he calmly advises those he robs. One victim, whom Coombs subjects to a lie-detector test in order to find an excuse not to pay the settlement, asks her if she is a “parasite” like the people she works for. (He also notes that he probably wouldn’t be taking the polygraph if he wasn’t Iranian.) Coombs herself is starting to wonder about the morality of her profession. To add to her disillusionment — she’s getting passed over for partnership and supplanted by a younger, flirtier female colleague.

What results from this subtle interplay of loyalties, desires, fears, and resentments is a dazzlingly orchestrated (if self-consciously so) series of unlikely partnerships, double and triple crosses, a sly reference to The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and one of the year’s more gratifying movie takedowns of a crass, asshole billionaire. Now, if only that could happen in real life.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, including Kathryn Bigelow: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) and For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).