Review: CAUGHT STEALING

 by Rob DiCristino

A foul-mouthed, snot-nosed crime thriller from…Darren Aronofsky?

Based on the novel by Charlie Huston, Caught Stealing takes place in New York City in 1998. For all those who may have forgotten — or those not old enough to remember at all — that’s Rudy Giuliani's New York, a period of “urban renewal” (gentrification) and “law and order” (police abuse) that spackled over much of the Big Apple’s seedy charm and sent crust punks and ne’er do-wells like Hank (Austin Butler) and Russ (Matt Smith) even farther from the madding crowd than they’d ever been before. The NYC of Caught Stealing is angry and cynical, a place where paramedics like Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) expect the worst and often see it come to pass. By setting his novel in this place and time, Huston highlights a particular brand of cultural mistrust and institutional corruption that has since become infamous. But by setting his film adaptation in that same place and time, director Darren Aronofsky recreates another era (era) gone by: The millennial heyday of the irreverent, rock n’ roll crime caper popularized by filmmakers like Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughn.

The madness begins when drug-dealing troublemaker Russ asks Hank, a washed-up baseball prospect from California who copes with his traumatic past by drinking his weight in Jim Beam every night, to watch his cat while he tends to his ailing father in London. Hank’s more of a dog guy, but Yvonne — in what is surely an effort to domesticate her almost-boyfriend — eagerly accepts the responsibility. This is all well and good and very very sexy until a pair of Russian gangsters (Yuri Kolokolnikov and Nikita Kukushkin) come looking for a cache of money that Russ apparently owes them. Their savage beat-down costs Hank a kidney and makes him an inadvertent pawn in game that involves an NYPD detective (Regina King), a pair of Hasidic hitmen (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schrieber), and a fledgling mob boss (Benito Martinez “Bad Bunny” Ocasio) looking to prove he’s got the guts to rise up. Hank just wants to hang out with Yvonne and watch his San Francisco Giants, but unless he can recover the money, he’s going to lose a lot more than a kidney.

In case it isn’t clear by now, Caught Stealing doesn’t exactly fit comfortably in Darren Aronofsky’s filmography. The New York native may have begun his career with left-handed tales from the greasy outskirts like Pi and Requiem for a Dream, but those films have an achy, bludgeoned spirituality at their cores, and most of his other output consists of esoteric psycho-sci-fi epics like The Fountain and Black Swan. Prestige plays like The Wrestler and The Whale prove that he can shoot for the middle when pressed, but Aronofsky still doesn’t seem like the guy you go to for brawling outlaws. There’s nothing wrong with a filmmaker challenging themselves, though — someone alert Wes Anderson — and it’s possible that Aronofsky just wanted a break from overwrought dramas about broken people who cry alone. In fact, Austin Butler’s Hank is a polite, upbeat guy; his buddies at the bar (including Action Bronson and Griffin Dunne) think the world of him, and even the misanthropic Yvonne can’t help but like a man who calls his mom every day.

It’s Hank’s essential decency that holds Caught Stealing together when it gets too madcap for its own good, when Charlie Huston’s screenplay trades the coherent characters and themes it builds early on — get ready to say goodbye to a very, very charismatic actor way, way too soon — for a fast-paced cat-and-mouse game that feels like it’s reaching for Sean Baker’s Anora or the work of the Safdie brothers without ever quite reaching their heights. Aronofsky may have abandoned the hip-hop editing of the Requiem for a Dream days, but his attempts at exuberance and rage still come off antiquated here, and it’s hard not to compare Caught Stealing — unfavorably — to period-appropriate genre entries like Snatch and Sexy Beast. Still, we do like our friend Hank. We want him and his cat to get out of this mess, and even when we spot six or seven missed opportunities for him to do so across what passes for Caught Stealing’s plot, we’re usually having a decent enough time with Aronofsky’s supporting cast to let the smaller gaps in logic go without too much of a fuss.

Ultimately, though, not even a charming turn from Austin Butler or a scantily-clad Zoë Kravitz can excuse Caught Stealing’s ramshackle construction and underwhelming action. You’ve already seen the best bits in the trailer — though the matzo ball soup bit is a tad funnier once you know that the great Carol Kane is involved — and even attempts at gross-out gore come off a little PG-13 for 2025: “Oh! He’s having surgery staples removed with pliers!" “Oh! He has to unclog his toilet after a rude cop shit in it!” “Oh! Someone kicked his cat!” There’s gnarlier stuff on basic cable these days, which means there’s no excuse for a relative youngin’ like Darren Aronofsky to be this squeamish on our silver screens when Martin Scorsese is out there having eighty-year-olds curb stomp each other. The ingredients are all here, but Aronofsky just doesn’t have a strong enough handle on the sandbox he’s trying to play in for Caught Stealing to develop into anything worth the sum of those parts. Like the 1998 San Francisco Giants, the whole thing is a big swing-and-miss.

Caught Stealing hits U.S. theaters on Friday, August 29th.