'One Battle After Another' Revolutionized Car Chases on Film. 'Crime 101' Struggles to Keep Pace

Crime 101 is a wannabe-cerebral crime thriller which has aspirations to be a thinking man’s car chase movie in the style of Bullitt. But director Bart Layton’s second narrative feature, after 2018’s American Animals, pales in the shadow of One Battle After Another, the recent Best Picture winner which quietly revolutionized the language of car chases on film.

Crime 101 Is Unremarkable in Every Way

Crime 101 is a tepid remounting of Heat (1995) starring Chris Hemsworth as a Los Angeles diamond thief who’s being tailed by both a hard-nosed detective (Mark Ruffalo) who’s determined to break the case and a creepy little weird guy played by (who else?) Barry Keoghan who scoots around on a motorbike and leaves violent chaos in his wake. Layton has aspirations towards a twisty, character-driven thriller, but can’t differentiate the plot enough to justify another regurgitation of this narrative. As Hemsworth’s paramour, A Complete Unknown’s Monica Barbaro delivers wan dialogue like, “When will it be enough for you?” She’s magnetic in spite of the bad screenwriting, but the movie is not.

Part of the problem with Crime 101 is that it wants to be a cerebral dissection of masculinity in a changing social landscape through the prism of a genre picture, but it doesn’t have the strength of its convictions to actually be cerebral. Layton keeps undercutting moments of potency by cutting back to hackneyed action sequences.

In a central dialogue scene between Ruffalo and Hemsworth–a lifeless tête-à-tête which badly wants to be the De Niro/Pacino diner scene from Heat but is closer to an improv class warm-up–name checks the classic Steve McQueen car chase picture Bullitt (1966). And Layton seems to fancy his movie a Bullitt or French Connection successor, staging a handful of sequences which attempt to milk maximum thrills out of fairly realistic, grounded car chase action.

The Timing of Crime 101's Release After One Battle Was Unfortunate

That it doesn’t work here is not entirely Layton’s fault. Just a few months ago, director Paul Thomas Anderson revolutionized the language of cinematic car chases with two jaw-dropping sequences in One Battle After Another. The film recently won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Anderson, who flawlessly accomplished bringing visceral thrills to a sequence of action which lacks the spectacle modern audiences are now accustomed to.

Much has been made about the final car chase in One Battle After Another, in which former French 75 revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) traverses a “river of hills” in order to save his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), from certain death at the hands of a preppy assassin (John Hoogenakker) who’s already run Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (absent Oscar winner Sean Penn) off the road. But equally impressive is a beat from earlier on in the film, after the French 75 members rob a bank and flee through a busy city center.

Anderson Captures Blockbuster Thrills Within a Grounded Framework

The sequence works as well as it does because Anderson and his cinematographer, Michael Bauman, acutely capture the sensation of being in a moving car. On a big screen, and especially in IMAX, it will make your stomach drop and give you a feeling approaching vertigo. Anderson is also an intelligent director of action, always keeping it in pocket and never letting things get too out of control. This early scene, peculiarly, feels spectacular because of how unspectacular it is. There are no explosions or toppling vehicles, just the very realistic sensation of cars pummeling one another and glass flying in all directions. There’s an inherent sense of danger to this scene, and to the river of hills sequence, that more verbose action movies cannot summon. 

Some of this is due to the bygone titillation of seeing real cars be demolished in real locations–the only digital effects used in the film are for DiCaprio’s vape smoke–but almost all of it is due to the methods used to lens the scene. The camera, always operating at the same height and velocity as an automobile, doesn’t stop moving while the vehicles are in motion. There are no locked down shots, and it feels you’re traveling apace with the cars on screen.

The same is true for the climax, as the three characters pursue one another through the river of hills. It’s shot in a brilliantly disorientating manner, with shots punched in just tight enough that the viewer feels as confused as the driver, not knowing what’s behind or in front of them. It’s astonishing that no one, in the entire history of moviemaking, thought to stage a sequence like this. But leave it to Anderson, one of the most consistently innovative and interesting filmmakers out there, to crack it.

When One Battle After Another released last September, the first remarks on the lips of most audience members had to do with that final car chase. The film is commendable for many reasons–as a rollicking chase picture, a scathingly current satire, and as pure a PTA movie as we’ve ever gotten–but it’s most indelible contribution to cinema will not be its Oscar wins or rep screenings but its innovation to the language of car chases on screen. In the years to come, we’re going to see a lot of car chases that resemble or try to recreate the visceral thrill of those in One Battle After Another. Perhaps a few will come close, but it seems unlikely that any will top Anderson’s magnum opus.