Caught Stealing, directed by Darren Aronofsky, is in cinemas now.
After 2022’s confronting obesity drama The Whale, director Darren Aronofsky has gone for a comedy crime thriller about an average Joe who gets caught up in the underworld of a pre-9/11 New York City.
The outrageously handsome Austin Butler plays failed baseball star-turned-bartender Hank Thompson, who agrees to feed his neighbour’s cat when the obnoxious English punk Russ (a hilarious turn by former Doctor Who Matt Smith) suddenly skips town.
But just as gentle mama’s boy Hank is minding his own business with his sexy paramedic girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), a gang of Russian thugs beat him to a pulp with demands for stolen money.
Hank wasn’t the thief but he becomes the most wanted civilian on the Lower East Side, pursued by the Puerto Ricans, the Slavs and even a couple of Hasidic hitmen.
You can see why Aronofsky was attracted to the story from Charlie Huston’s 2004 debut novel with the writer adapting it for the screen. It’s unashamed in its nods to movie history. The mistaken-identity premise is very Hitchcock, the loved-up couple Hank and Yvonne echo the pair at the centre of the Tarantino-scripted True Romance, while Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio’s (very funny) Jewish brothers taking Hank to their grandma’s for matzo soup in between bloody shootings is very Scorsese. As are the echoes of his After Hours from 1985, complete with the casting of its star, Griffin Dunne.
Aronofsky knows how to set the old-school scene, too, with a soundtrack that mixes new songs by the Idles with 90s alt-rock hits delivering a nostalgia trip to a time when no one had a cellphone to get them out of trouble. The director’s usual cinematographer Matthew Libatique shoots it beautifully, and the film-makers take visceral violence to Guy Ritchie levels.
It’s at its most engaging when Butler and Kravitz are together – this pair have chemistry and chutzpah – but inevitably it devolves into one long game of cat and mouse. Butler’s undeniable talent (ironically, he lost the acting Oscar for his Elvis to The Whale’s Brendan Fraser) gets lost in a messy movie that hurtles from good time to predictability and leaves no lasting impression. Other than the one that Caught Stealing has pinched a few too many things from better movies.
Rating out of five: ★★★½
