Thriller film Crime 101 starring Chris Hemsworth is out now in theatres.

Based on a 2020 novella by Don Winslow, it follows jewel thief Mike Davis’ (Hemsworth) heists along California’s US Route 101, which have left the police baffled.

When he sets his sights on the ultimate score, his plans intersect with those of insurance broker Sharon Colvin (Halle Berry).

Detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo) believes he has cracked Mike’s pattern and is determined to bring him down before the next job.

In an interview, director Bart Layton recalled that the idea for the project came to him in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he received the novella.

“There was a sort of sun-bleached quality to it, which felt like everything that we didn’t have at that moment,” he said.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is a really great sort of superstructure for a movie in the vein of the ones that I certainly remembered best as a teenager, or in the 80s and 90s. Proper, grown-up movies, films that were thoughtful, but they were also great Saturday-night, popcorn movies,” he added.

With his idea finally coming to life, the filmmaker believes in his star-studded project and promises theatre goers a good time.

“I think one of the things that maybe will be really most surprising or gratifying about the film is people seeing how brilliant a performer Chris is,” he noted, praising the Australian actor known for playing Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“We changed the way he holds himself. We changed his hair and eye colour, because he’s so extraordinary-looking that the challenge for me was to make sure the character is also quite real and quite grounded,” he added.