Fun

Movie: Crime 101

Info

  • Released: February, 2026
  • Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Halle Berry
  • Director: Bart Layton

Summary

A sad-sack detective (Mark Ruffalo) is getting divorced, moving to the beach, and obsessed tracking down a thief that is untraceable. Naturally, rest of dept thinks his theory is crazy.

The thief (Chris Hemsworth) is meticulous, calm, and socially inept. He has fancy clothes, fancy car, fancy watch, fancy apartment all with no character. Naturally,
he falls in love, awkwardly, and decides one last big score. His boss decides he’s lost his edge and replaces him with a psycho thief.

Hemsworth then tries to recruit an insurance agent (Halle Berry) for high end customers to help him identify his victims. Of course, she’s put down on the job and gets fed up. After agreeing to help with the theft, Berry instead betrays him to Ruffalo.

For the final score, everything goes crazy, all the bad guys lose, all our characters are compromised, and they all live happily ever after.

Opinion

Mark Ruffalo looks like Peter Falk in Columbo. The story is almost good. I thought the title, Crime 101 was about learning how to do crime but really it’s referring to Highway 101 in California — that’s probably the best twist of the movie.

Fun

Movie: Mercy

Info

  • Released: January, 2026
  • Starring: Chris Pratt
  • Director: Timur Bekmambetov

Summary

In the near future an AI called Mercy acts as judge, jury, and executioner (effectively). Imagine
all personal media, location data, surveillance camera, transactions, etc is
placed in the cloud by law. When a murder occurs and the AI determines there’s a high probability of who did it then a trial starts immediately and the defendant has 90 minutes to convince reduce the AI’s probability to < 92% — otherwise execution happens.

There've been only 18 such trials, I assume they were all found guilty.

Naturally, a detective who's a big supporter of Mercy finds himself in the executioner's seat, accused of murdering his wife and the clock is ticking.

Opinion

Mercy is 75% an action movie, 15% about justice, and 10% a mystery. The idea of a rush to judgment by the AI is too obvious. That anyone could effectively defend themselves in the circumstances ludicrous. At least it's reasonable that Chris Pratt's character could be guilty though the twist at the end is too much.