Based on a novella by prolific crime novelist Don Winslow that was part of his 2020 collection Broken, Bart Layton's Crime 101 plays heavily on a broad collection of stock characters familiar to the avid reader and watcher of crime fiction: the mysterious gentleman thief, the determined detective whose theory no one believes, and the one-last-heist scenario that brings it all together. There is nothing new under the California sun here, but Layton, whose first two features, The Impostor (2012) and American Animals (2018), provocatively blurred the lines between fiction and documentary in spinning true crime tales, curates the familiar with enough assuredness that the film can sustain quite a bit of ambiguity, making it more intriguing than the typical, star-powered crime thriller. This is easily Layton's most conventional film to date, and comparisons to Michael Mann and David Mamet are inevitable and, to some degree, deserved.

The main character, who we know for most of the film as Mike (Chris Hemsworth), is a serial jewel thief who pulls off all of his well-orchestrated hits within a mile or so of Los Angeles's 101 freeway (hence the film's sorta-silly title). Because there are so many bank and jewel robberies in Los Angeles (something anyone who has seen Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break will know), his crimes tend to dissolve into all the other ones, although dogged police detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo) has correctly identified him as a unique criminal with a pattern that everyone else, including his long-suffering partner (Corey Hawkins), refuses to acknowledge. For most of the movie, Mike is a complete enigma. Because he is played by a handsome leading man, we tend to give him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that there is more to him than the seemingly shallow surface with which we are presented. And this appears to be one of the film's primary ploys, as Layton draws out the ambiguity of Mike's character to the breaking point, skating on Hemsworth's matinee good looks while subverting his inherent charm by showing Mike to be so invested in his criminality that he has difficulty interacting with ordinary people in everyday life.

When confronting his gruff fence (Nike Nolte) or charming a desperate insurance agent (Halle Barry) into working with him on a heist, he is Ocean's-level gold. But, when on a first date with a woman from the regular world (Monica Barbaro) who rear-ended him earlier that week, he fumbles and struggles to engage in even the most banal of casual conversation. Mike is so good at being a mystery man that he has squeezed all the life out of his life, which is a dangerous gambit for a protagonist in a slick crime thriller. You can constantly feel the tension between Layton's desire to make a complex character study and his need to feed the Hollywood machine with big action set-pieces and criminal glamour, but that is actually part of the film's trick. There is a scene between Mike and Sharon, the Halle Berry character, where she "reads" him and notes that he is too "perfect"—the hair, the clothes, the watch—which is a coy way for Layton to comment on the stylized surface the industry requires to distract from all the ambiguity and moral quagmires.

When Maya, the woman Mike starts dating, looks around his minimalist beachside penthouse and notes that it is completely devoid of anything personal, she is essentially summing up his character: He is all signifiers with no apparent interiority. Thus, it is to the film's (and Hemsworth's) credit that we still want to stick with the character on the hope that some of the interiority will eventually emerge. And the trick is that it does, and it doesn't. We do learn some important information about his background late in the film—essentially where he came from—but it is just a glimpse that whets our appetite for more that isn't ever to come. But, somehow it is enough knowing that it is out there, and the film leaves us with a surprisingly moving epilogue in which he offers that knowledge via a simple photograph.

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