Caught Stealing

Rating 3/10

At this point, crime thrillers steeped in dark comedy are a dime a dozen. The 1990s were full of them. The best thrive on invention. Darren Aronofsky’s latest is utterly lacking. The director aspires to take us on a delightfully wild ride through a criminal underworld. What we get is a tired rehash of better movies from decades past.

Set in 1998 New York, the story follows Hank Thompson (Austin Butler), a washed-up former baseball prospect turned bartender, who numbs his regrets with alcohol. His paramedic girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), does her best to hold his life together. When Hank’s punk-rock neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), abruptly leaves town, he saddles Hank with the care of his cat. That’s when the nightmare begins for him…and the audience.

Soon, he’s pursued by Russian mobsters Aleksei (Yuri Kolokolnikov) and Pavel (Nikita Kukushkin), Hasidic gangster brothers Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully Drucker (Vincent D’Onofrio), their Puerto Rican enforcer Colorado (Bad Bunny), and a narcotics detective, Elise Roman (Regina King), with questionable motives. At the center of it all is a missing key tied to shady drug deals, a MacGuffin that sets the mayhem in motion.

Aronofsky is a director I once championed. Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and Black Swan remain towering cinematic achievements. I even defended the divisive Mother! But his recent output has been rough: The Whale, despite Brendan Fraser’s heartfelt performance, was a terrible picture. Now comes Caught Stealing, and it might be even worse. This isn’t a bold misfire; it’s a lifeless one. It flops because it’s supremely artless.

This is the kind of movie people claim they don’t make anymore. Thanks to this dreck, it’ll be a while before they try again. The late ’90s were the golden age of hyper-violent ensemble crime stories: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Go, and True Romance all did it with style and wit. Guy Ritchie built an early career on them with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Even more recently, Ritchie’s The Gentlemen or the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time managed to breathe fresh life into the genre. Caught Stealing wants to be part of the same touchstones. An innocent caught in a night of escalating chaos also owes a healthy debt to After Hours by Martin Scorsese. That film’s star, Griffin Dunne, even makes a cameo here. He only reminds us how much better that classic was.

The cruelty here is relentless, and it’s not in service of anything compelling. Characters are dispatched with shocking casualness. Their deaths are meant to underline Hank’s suffering, but they leave the audience feeling pummeled as well. One soul we truly care about is discovered in a pool of their own blood, fresh stitches are torn open, and bones snap again and again. Aronofsky lingers on every gruesome detail, but without an engaging script to justify all the savagery, the brutality is hollow and exploitative.  Author Charlie Huston turns his own novel (a book I’ll never touch) into a screenplay that offers gore, but no wit, twists, or thrills.

What makes the disappointment sting even more is the wasted talent. Austin Butler is a magnetic presence. He proved his abilities in Elvis and Dune: Part Two. Here, he’s stuck in a thankless role, charisma zapped by bad writing. He’s surrounded by an ensemble of heavyweights: Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Carol Kane, Griffin Dunne, and Laura Dern (stay through the credits). The script reduces a cast of great actors to unrecognized cogs in a useless machine.

In the end, it isn’t the excess violence or the idiotic plot that sinks this exercise; it’s the generic, uninspired handling of the material. Darren Aronofsky, once a daring and innovative filmmaker, delivers something so shockingly anonymous.  In a story that is about searching for a missing key, the cruelest irony is that Aronofsky himself has lost the key to what once made him great.

09-02-25