It’s us, the people who paused the Prime Video crime thriller Crime 101 – it’s right in the name! – to Street View snoop on exact highway exits and the film’s many, many Los Angeles locations. Because LA is a character in Crime, just like Chris Hemsworth’s loner jewel thief, Mark Ruffalo’s determined sad sack of a police detective, and Halle Berry’s frustrated seller of high-end insurance policies. And when all those people come together, it’s the same road that drives them there. US Route 101, which runs through the heart of LA when it isn’t stretching up and down the coast for 1,500 miles. In Crime 101, a sense of place is everything.
Written and directed by Bart Layton, from a 2020 novella by Don Winslow, this film about an exacting, nearly nameless criminal caught in a heist gone six kinds of sideways has a lot of cool references to other LA underworld sagas, like Heat and Drive. There is also the energy of the Den of Thieves movies in here, because those were cool for letting Gerard Butler get weird alongside thrilling gunfights at speed. As the garrulous Big Nick, Butler proved that trust in him, after years of making action movies better by really showing up. And Crime 101 is cooler still for building around Hemsworth a stylized, genre-type action film, but with a character not conventionally Hemsworthian. Don’t worry, though.Traditional Hemsworthian is also involved. Watch out, wiley rival diamond thief (and total psycho) played by Barry Keoghan!
But what is Crime 101 about? And for that matter, how does Crime 101 end? Decider’s Ending Explained crew has your answers. But first, a warning. *Exit this heist now if you don’t wanna know how it all goes down.*
Crime 101 Plot Summary
He calls himself Mike (Hemsworth). But if you believe that’s a real name, we’ve got a bunch of fake stolen diamonds to sell you. Solitary and methodical, Mike plans and executes heists for rocks up and down the 101, then fences the booty through Money (Nick Nolte). He hits jewelry stores and diamond industry couriers, smoothly, never with violence, and always with inside information. This is why when Mike impersonates a jeweler’s bodyguard, right down to his designer suit and blacked-out 2015 Chrysler 300, the couriers never see him coming. He’s so prepared, he even knows they’re bogus diamonds being couriered. If only messier life stuff responded to such analytical professional rigor. When the attractive Maya (Monica Barbaro) randomly rear-ends his personal vehicle, a matte grey Dodge Challenger, despite his Hemsworthian stature, Mike is a tongue-tied mess.
LAPD Detective Lou Lubesnick (Ruffalo) has been tracking the patterns of Mike’s lone wolf diamond heists. His theories are a tough sell to the brass, though, because all they see is a washed oldhead desperate for a big collar before he dies on the job. But Lou catches a break at the scene of Mike’s latest crime. The thief didn’t cause it, but violence did occur. And blood traces were left behind. Detective Lubesnick links Mike’s DNA to a police record marked by a violent childhood that led to foster care.
Sharon Combs (Berry) wants to land a whale for her insurance firm, “gazillionaire” Steven Monroe (Tate Donovan). But with no support from her shitty, mostly male fellow execs – and a healthy dose of ageism – Sharon finds her partner track stalling out, even after she gave it decades of her life. When she meets Mike, it seems by chance. But this is all part of his plan. And his offer to cut her in on a lucrative criminal scheme suddenly sounds pretty good, considering the A-holes she works with.
Everyone’s always driving everywhere in LA, and job and life connections have also thrown Sharon and Lou together. So it’s the detective, now disgraced at work by circumstances beyond his control, who Sharon turns to for help with the Mike situation. She got in too deep, and with Money siccing an unstable thief named Ormon (Keoghan) on her, she’s terrified.
Now we’re in uncharted territory for all these people. Mike is putting his usual style plan in motion to rob Monroe, the rich guy Sharon told him about. But he doesn’t know that Lou has insinuated himself into the heist, posing as the diamond courier. He knows even less about the movements of Ormon. And at the drop, diamonds for five million in cash, nothing goes according to plan.
Crime 101 Ending Explained
It was Lou’s plan to intercede with his police powers, once the heist popped off, so he has his service weapon hidden in the briefcase of the diamond courier he is impersonating. But even though Mike was onto Money trying to screw him – he’d clocked Ormon tailing him, and doing other jobs badly that were meant for him – neither Mike, Lou, nor Sharon expect Ormon to pop out of the walls of the hotel they’re meeting in. While Detective Lubesnick is trying to arrest everyone, Ormon is waving a gun around, and eventually shoots Steven Monroe. And this prompts Mike to shoot and kill Ormon, before he can do the same thing to Lou. The cop and the criminal have established a kind of understanding by this point – it has a lot to do with Lubesnick actually taking the time to understand his past, to really see him, in a way no one ever did. There is no honor among thieves between Mike and Ormon. Cop or not, he killed to protect his friend.
Monroe is one of these impossibly wealthy snakes who got what he got by whatever means necessary. Lubesnick convinces him to go along with a concocted story, that Ormon was the heister hitting all the 101 jobs in addition to this one, which frees Mike from this botched job. He disappears. Lou also looks out for Sharon, who receives the real diamonds from the busted heist. And from an unknown distance, Mike gifts Lou with another one of his vehicles, a vintage Chevy Camaro in gorgeous forest green. It’s a whole lot cooler than Lou’s rumpled suit of a police-issue Crown Vic.
Maybe Mike is far away, planning his next set of heists for what could be a sequel. (Crime 101 presents Don Winslow’s original novella in full, but as we know, Los Angeles crime movies are a perennial.) Then again, maybe Mike isn’t far away at all, but is instead still lonely in the vast neon upside down of Los Angeles. When an envelope arrives at Maya’s office, it has her first name, no postmark, and isn’t sealed. (Mike’s preparations, always one step ahead.) And inside are photos of himself as a little boy, probably the only ones he knows, which he’d like to share with another person who finally really saw him. Next time we’re driving through the LA exits on US-101, we’re gonna look and see who’s in the vehicles around us. In that town, chances are good they’re all involved in something.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.