From the director of American Animals comes Heat-esque thriller Crime 101. Halle Berry’s just joined the cast, which also includes Chris Hemsworth and Barry Keoghan.
It’s been well over a year since we last heard of Crime 101, a Heat-style crime thriller about ‘high level jewel thefts that are taking place up and down the Pacific Coast.’ It was in the midst of last year’s Hollywood strikes when news of the film announced and as such, in the raft of rescedulings that have since taken place, there’ s been something of a reshuffle.
As it stands, it doesn’t seem like we’ll be getting the Chris Hemsworth/Pedro Pascal face-off that we were originally promised. A raft of reschedulings in the wake of the strike (not least Marvel’s Fantastic Four) has already caused Pascal to drop out of Zach Cregger’s Weapons – and it seems that the same has happened here, with Pascal no longer topping the film’s bill.
Hemsworth is still involved and the additional casting announcements are quite something. As you may have gathered from the headline, Halle Berry has joined the project, which is said to shoot this month. Mark Ruffalo and Barry Keoghan have also signed up. Crime 101 will be director, Bart Layton’s first film since 2018’s American Animals, in which Keoghan starred.
The film’s announcement has (per Variety) given us slightly more detail to work with, and it certainly sounds like the classic cop versus criminal premise that made Heat so memorable: Crime 101 follows a detective named Lou Lubesnick, whose quarry is a “debonair lone-wolf jewel thief” according to the trade paper’s original story. Like Heat's Neil Macaulay, he’s “evaded capture thanks to living by a very strict code.”
(Our strict code, which has worked exceptionally well so far, is to simply not steal jewels.)
There’s no word as to who’s playing who as yet, with Hemsworth, Ruffalo and Berry all more than capable of playing a ‘a debonair lone-wolf jewel thief’. Keoghan is apparently set to play a fence (someone who knowingly buys stolen goods – not a division between gardens) although the outlet states that he and Ruffalo are yet to formally sign up for the film.
We’ll bring you more on this one as we hear it.
