Movies to watch this week: Wuthering Heights gets steamy makeover, two Avengers reunite, new horror falls flat

We also get Chris Hemsworth as Mike Davis, a well-dressed loner jewel thief who has reshaped every aspect of his life for maximum efficiency –presumably no relation to the late author Mike Davis, a leftist historian who wrote extensively about LA, though if Mann himself had been at the wheel I might wonder.

Like any number of Mann heroes, Mike feels the need to bring order out of chaos, as he’s told by Sharon Colvin (Halle Berry), who writes high-end insurance policies for a living.

Sharon’s job is basically risk assessment, meaning she’s honed her talent for reading people at a glance. But her intuition doesn’t extend to realising she’ll probably never get that promotion she’s been awaiting – and with her pride in playing by the rules, she initially gives Mike the brush-off when he courts her to help him pull off his next heist.

Elsewhere in the naked city are other men interested in Sharon for their own reasons, notably Lou Lubesnick, an affably scruffy police detective played by Mark Ruffalo with a hint of Columbo. Also in the mix is Ormon (Barry Keoghan), a younger, bleached-blond thug who is chaos incarnate.

Even if there’s little here we haven’t seen before, it’s possible to imagine how the film could have worked as a set of low-key character studies, everyone desperate to seize hold of an unlikely dream before time runs out.

But Layton, under the spell of Mann, gives the material an operatic, grandiose treatment it doesn’t particularly warrant or benefit from (the 140-minute runtime is one sign of this, though a good example of an alternate approach would be Quentin Tarantino’s still longer but far more laidback Jackie Brown).

Even at their best, Layton and his team can do more than simulate certain aspects of Mann’s obsessively fine-tuned style. Some of the flourishes are downright odd, like a moment when the camera swivels upside down for no evident reason. Nor are there more than glimmers of the romantic melancholy that gives Mann’s choices their rationale.

All that said, Crime 101 is worth a look, if only for the stacked cast, which includes Nick Nolte and Jennifer Jason Leigh in small roles. Hemsworth and Ruffalo both being former members of the Avengers, there’s a sense that they’re cashing in the opportunity to reunite in a context at least nominally closer to the real world.

As it turns out, Hemsworth is rather too much of a natural charmer to play a sealed-off OCD type, and Ruffalo is more fun to watch than strictly believable (his performance is full of actorly bits of business, such as a clumsy bid to roll up a yoga mat).

Keoghan as usual is arrestingly weird enough to distract you from the question of whether he can act at all in the usual sense. But Berry, positioned outside the cops-and-robbers framework, supplies most of whatever emotional credibility the film has, letting her character’s mask of professionalism slip a little further with each scene.