Crime 101

Well, I didn’t go into 2026 expecting Crime 101 to be the first film I talked about on here, but this is where we are now. And what a film it is to start with.

Sorry, not a film – a two and a half hour slog through every cliché of the crime noir genre: detective with a failing marriage, bank robber who is too scared to get close to someone, cop and robber intertwining with each other and maybe they’re two sides of the same coin, a woman who won’t stand for men telling her what to do, love interest who finds the main character mysterious even though he’s clearly not emoting properly. But, worry not people, this does bring something new to the genre; a constant fetish for the 101 Freeway and Los Angeles as a city. Seriously, this feels like the real crime.

And honestly, that’s all there really is to this movie – there is no subtext, no character arcs, no plot developments that are worth caring about. This is a film made for those insufferable internet cliques who think Martin Scorsese is the greatest person to ever walk the earth, who think that the only films worth watching involve gangsters, and the mafia and New York in the 1970s. This is a crime noir for those who though Joker was a piece of art worth investing time in.

Ever since it started creating its own content, films and TV shows on Netflix have significantly decreased in quality over the last ten years, with the streamer focusing on quantity of content over quality, and from this we seem to be in a new age of movie-making; the age of ‘Made for Streaming’. Following in the footprints of the ‘Made for Video’ and ‘Made for DVD’ ages before it, the new ‘MfS’ world we find ourselves in is pushing the world further and further into a place where good writing is an expense that can’t be spared and the focus should always be on getting big names in to “act” and then stich those scenes together with little thought to the end result. We’ve arrived at a place that rewards mediocrity with full audiences and drowns out the smaller productions, all in the search for items that will fill the void of someone’s commute in three week’s time.

And that’s what Crime 101 reeks of – a studio seemingly trying to get people to forget about its last release less than a month ago of a bribe documentary that no-one saw, with a film so clearly made to be put on it’s streaming platform and forgotten about, that there has been no marketing campaign whatsoever. All of the four main stars gracing the passably designed poster put in performances that would be most accurately described with a bag of un-steamed white rice; frightfully bland. No one appears to want to put in any more effort than contractually obliged, other than Monica Barbaro, rather all involved seem stuck between being bored and embarrassed to be involved. There is probably a perfectly adequate film in the shell of this product, but it would need at least an hour of footage cut out, and three bags of speed given to each actor to coax out any sort of performance.

This all being said, there is a chance that my boredom with this film was unfairly dragged down by the awful behaviour of the fellow audience members in the screening with myself and my friend (his reaction was definitely more favourable than mine), but I would argue that a better film would be able to distract me from the phones and talking around me.

To round out, Crime 101, in the immutable words of Amy Santiago, “ya bore me!”