REVIEW:
Let’s start with this little fact… the title here is terrible. It’s a play on words, only you roiled never know it without watching the movie. The deeper meaning or inside joke of it is actually pretty cool, but it’s not worth giving the movie such a basic title to get there. You see, the 101 doesn’t refer to simplicity and starting out, like a 101 course in college, but instead refers to highway 101 in California, which is where all the crimes are happening. And if that were mentioned in anyway in the trailer, then this title would have been a whole lot cooler. But let’s get past the title now and talk about the actual movie itself.
As it happens, the movie is way better than expected. Yes, it’s about a thief (played by Chris Hemsworth,) who is meticulous in what he does and has everything down to a science, and we’ve seen that before. Often it’s about the getaway drivers (Drive, Baby Driver,) or a team of thieves (Heat, the Town.) Here, it’s a one man show and our thief is not as perfect as we’ve come to expect from these movies. He nearly gets shot in the first Jin we see him do.
If the movie were just about the thief, or about the cop and the thief, it wouldn’t have been enough. But this one also features two other main characters. There’s the woman who is stuck at a cross roads on morality decisions and the worse thief who is the movies villain. He’s played by Barry Keoghan. The woman is played by Halle Berry. She works for an insurance company that insures high priced items, like the ones being stolen.
The fact is, we have seen most of this before. We’ve seen the rogue cop with his theory (played by Mark Ruffalo here, the theory is that our thief only does robberies along highway 101, and doesn’t resort to violence.) We’ve seen movies where there’s a criminal or assassin with a moral compass who is our protagonist and then another one who is even worse, they becomes the villain of the film (Gross Pointe Blank, Assassins.)
But despite this movie falling in line with a number of cliches, there are other areas where it does offer up something new. Ruffalo’s theory, for example, doesn’t sit well with the police chief who recognizes that it means having to revisit certain past cases, which have already been closed, just because they fit the profile. With him, it’s all about the stats and numbers, which is the kind of behind the scenes info we usually don’t get in movies, but definitely got in the HBO show the Wire.
Similarly, the other best storyline in this movie is also about behind the scenes lies. It involves Halle Berry’s character. This one is more of a corporate business story than anything else, but it is still very interesting. Berry feels like she has been used by this company, and promised promotions that never came. And now she’s being told she’s too old and over the hill. It’s the story, out of all of these, that feels the most real.
Between her story and Ruffalo’s, this movie definitely has some compelling things to offer. But it also has a lot that we’ve seen before, mainly in the rivalry between Hemsworth and Barry Keoghan. There’s always that new young psycho, trying to change the rules, who has no respect for life. This movie is basically a somewhat fresh take on some familiar storylines.