"Crime 101" - Cops and robbers.

Crime 101 asks a very important question - what if we made another Steve McQueen (the actor) movie? If you're like me and couldn't pick a Steve McQueen movie out of a lineup because you're under the age when you can collect social security benefits, you don't care about the answer to that question. I'm sure there are film enthusiasts screaming at me right now, but I can't hear you. Would it help if I told you I've never seen a Godfather movie either? Ahhh, there it is.

For the record, I did know that McQueen died decades ago at a relatively young age (I had to look up that that age was fifty). And speaking of dead, my favorite quote from a fellow film critic following the movie was "I thought Nick Nolte was dead." Yes, I was laughing, and I can't say I blame him for thinking that. If you asked me to name a Nick Nolte movie, the most recent I can recall is Blue Chips from 1994. And I've seen a bunch of movies he's been in since Blue Chips. The point is that one of the more memorable parts of a movie should not be that Nick Nolte is still alive.

The other point is I'm not sure styling a movie after an actor who's been dead for almost half a century is a big selling point. That's not me being glib. The film goes out of its way to tell the audience that we’re watching an homage to McQueen (two characters will literally name drop McQueen and two of his movies during one scene); a subtle acknowledgement that writer/director Bart Layton knows the vast majority of the audience couldn't name a McQueen movie, let alone has seen one.

Mike "Steve McQueen" Davis (Chris Hemsworth) is a jewel thief. Mike is extremely meticulous in both the planning and execution of his thefts. He only targets couriers (not stores), never uses violence (just the threat of violence), never leaves any evidence that could lead back to him, and always commits the heists near the 101 freeway in Los Angeles. Detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo) has deduced this pattern, but nobody at the precinct believes him, including his partner Detective Tillman (Corey Hawkins). The film begins by showing Mike pulling off a heist, emphasizing all of those details. It's a solid start, but the film gradually buries itself under two hours of half-baked subplots, underdeveloped side characters, and forgotten setups.

By my count, there are at least five different subplots on top of the main plot of heist. There's a romantic subplot, a police corruption subplot, an insurance industry subplot, a workplace misogyny subplot, and a no-honor-among-thieves subplot. Even for a two-hour-and-twenty-minute movie, that's at least one subplot too many, if not three.

That many subplots is why the film features a bunch of underdeveloped characters. The romantic subplot involves a woman named Maya (Monica Barbaro) whom Mike meets after she rear-ends him at a stop light. The film initially develops Mike as a loner, probably OCD, and focused solely on being a thief. Think Ben Affleck’s character in The Accountant, but far less patronizing. Maya’s entire purpose in the film is to show the human side of Mike, but Mike’s aversion to violence already does that. That means Maya is reduced to little more than looking pretty, then making pouty faces and noises when Mike says he has to go away for a while for “work.” If any of the subplots should have been cut, it was this one.

They could have combined the romantic subplot with the insurance subplot featuring Sharon Combs (Halle Berry). Sharon is handling the insurance claim by the jeweler robbed in the opening scene. Simultaneously, she is trying to close an insurance contract with a rich guy (Tate Donovan). On top of that, she is pushing her boss to finally make her partner after years of broken promises from the extremely male board of partners at the firm. That’s three different subplots, so making Sharon the love interest might have been too much. Just kidding, it wouldn’t have been too much with just a couple of tiny tweaks. The real reason they didn’t is because that’s practically the plot of The Thomas Crown Affair and would have been too on-the-nose considering that’s one of the movies Lubesnick name drops.

Similar to the female lead in The Thomas Crown Affair (I did see the Pierce Brosnan remake), Sharon is involved in the climactic heist, though Sharon is actively helping Mike because of that whole misogyny-at-work issue. At least, until she changes her mind. But that doesn’t stop Mike because he planned for the scenario where Sharon might betray him.

Just kidding, Mike doesn’t plan for that. Nor does he bother to keep tabs on the detective tracking him. Nor does he really seem to plan anything in any real detail after that first heist. A meticulous and detail-oriented thief is caught by surprise by multiple things that were practically screaming at him for attention. And that is my biggest frustration with the film.

That entire first heist scene with all of the attention to detail is all setup but the rest of the movie doesn’t pay any of it off. It just puts quasi-random obstacles in Mike’s way, plays duck, duck, goose with the subplots through the entire movie, includes a lengthy car chase scene ala Bullitt, then tries to tie everything up in a nice, neat bow that is one hundred percent predictable and zero percent satisfying. And don’t think I’m spoiling the ending. Mike pulling off the final robbery and driving off into the sunset with an unbelievably forgiving Maya (while Sharon starts her own insurance firm) is just as unsatisfying as Ludesnick foiling the heist and Mike going to jail (while Sharon starts her own insurance firm). But Nick Nolte is still alive, so it’s all good.

Rating: Ask for half your money back and do it in detail.