Task without the accent

Last year, we saw Chris Hemsworth (the largest man) on set with Halle Berry working on Crime 101, a heist thriller that also stars Mark Ruffalo, Barry Keoghan, Monica Barbaro, Corey Hawkins, and Nick Nolte. Well, now we have a trailer, and I am SUPER into it. Crime 101 is about a high-end thief played by Hemsworth plotting to steal from an insurance company, with Halle Berry playing the inside woman. Mark Ruffalo is the agent tracking the mysterious thief across Los Angeles. Extremely my sh-t.

I’m also a fan of this director, Bart Layton, who previously made the documentary The Imposter about Frédéric Bourdin, a Frenchman who claimed to be a missing Texas teenager, as well as 2018’s American Animals, which is a documentary-narrative hybrid depicting a heist at a university library. (Check out American Animals for a rare “not playing a crazy guy” performance from Evan Peters.) Crime 101 is Layton’s first film since American Animals, and it’s his first wholly narrative film, with the script adapted from Don Winslow’s novella of the same name. I’m very interested to see what Layton does with a fully narrative film.

Of course, this is also a reunion of Thor and Hulk, though honestly, the moment in the trailer that Ruffalo and Hemsworth share the screen didn’t ping my Marvel radar. I was just thinking about how much I love heist movies and cat-and-mouse crime dramas. I was thinking about the recent Louvre heist and HBO’s Task, which just wrapped up last Sunday. In Task, Mark Ruffalo also plays an agent tracking a criminal, though it is set in Philadelphia, so everyone gets to do that tricky Delco accent actors love to brag about “perfecting”. Ruffalo is very good in Task, but the real standout is Tom Pelphrey, perhaps best known as Kaley Cuoco’s baby daddy, though he will undoubtedly be a front runner at the 2026 Emmys (he was previously nominated for Ozark). 

Sadly, no one in Task is named “Task” and no one in Crime 101 is named “Crime” or “101”—more projects should commit to the bit like Reacher and Bosch—but they do have Mark Ruffalo, thieves, and dangerous games of cat-and-mouse in common, and Crime 101 also has Halle Berry and Monica Barbaro both being total babes, and no one has a distracting accent. Honestly, Task without the accent is a lure all of its own.