‘Caught Stealing’ Review: Darren Aronofsky Goes Full Guy Ritchie Mode and Makes His Best Movie in 15 Years [B]

There’s an age-old moviemaking proverb that the new Austin Butler-starring crime thriller Caught Stealing abides by strictly, a sort of promise of destiny that this movie was born to fulfill: once you make The Whale, there’s nowhere to go but up. Such is the situation director Darren Aronofsky finds himself in, successfully cashing in on his opportunity for some minor goodwill on making absolutely anything that is not The Whale with his best movie since 2010’s Black Swan. That what he chose to do was trade his relative art house credibility for a project that feels like he knows he’s punching below the weight of the work of his glory days by making a simple, pulpy action programmer is either a flagrantly cynical calculation on his part or a small stroke of genius, not that those two things must be mutually exclusive.

What you see is what you get with Caught Stealing, and that’s absolutely the best-case scenario for this Guy Ritchie-feeling riff on ‘90s crime movies, written by Charlie Huston and based on his book of the same name. This is, indeed, the kind of irreverent ensemble genre movie that would have slotted right into the wave of Pulp Fiction knockoffs, and could reasonably claim bragging rights as being one of the better ones (the film is even set in 1998, the year of Ritchie’s debut feature Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). Aronofsky may abandon any real sense of loftiness — and by extension a regularly airheaded idea of profundity — that has recently outlined his work, but by paring down his artistic ethos into something decidedly unambitious, he experiences an upsurge in relative quality. It’s not often I compliment a movie for seeming like it could have been directed by anybody, but part of why Caught Stealing works is that it seems distinctly un-Aronofsky-ish. 

But maybe that’s not fair, because there’s a level to the filmmaking and tone-setting here that elevates a script that’s both derivative and somewhat chaotic into something more than simply a regurgitation of a million movies you’ve seen before, and one that has a tight sense of progression despite its many ludicrous detours. There are familiar shades all over this thing, but Aronofsky, several of his regular collaborators, including editor Andrew Weisblum and cinematographer Matthew Libatique, and a varied assemblage of game performers featuring both newer stars and more storied character actors, make for a film that is generally fun, tense, and effective on its own terms.

Also, there’s a splendid cat that serves as a major narrative crux: barely-scraping-by New York City bartender Hank Thompson (Butler) is simply trying to enjoy his life of hooking up with Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) after work when his mohawk-sporting, Brit-punk neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) saddles him with a feline companion, Bud (the real cat’s name is Tonic, who you may remember from 2019’s Pet Sematary), while Russ heads off to England to check on his dying father. Soon enough, a criminal underworld of varied nationalities and cultures comes knocking at Hank’s door to beat the shit out of him for whatever he knows about Russ, who apparently owes a bunch of people a lot of money: Russian mobsters, Jewish mobsters, Puerto Rican mobsters — all prepared to put Hank under the gun over information he is certainly not privy to. His only recourse is to work with detective Roman (Regina King), but he’s always at risk of getting completely pummeled — to effectively set the stakes, Hank has to have a ruptured kidney removed following his very first interaction with a couple of these goons. And they give the cat a limp! 

That’s an element that helps Caught Stealing set itself apart. Though it moves with a sprightly comic energy, and finds humor situationally and through organic performance decisions as opposed to exasperating riffing, it has a real follow-through and sense of consequence as it pertains to its violence. It leads to some occasional tonal whiplash, as if the movie simultaneously wants to be something of a cartoon and a gritty NYC crime saga. But it’s admirable how much weight the script puts behind the idea of Hank getting powerlessly caught up in a shitty situation, where bad luck and unfortunate choices lead to meaningful deaths and bloodshed. When a character is accidentally knocked over the head with a baseball bat, it’s semi-funny, but it has legitimate story-related consequences. It’s nice to see a movie like this hold itself to the fire so firmly when it comes to the logic of, and repercussions faced by, its characters. 

Those characters are a fun set of archetypes to watch race around New York, with attractive on-location shooting from Libatique, who shot digitally and puts a filmic grain filter over his images — even still, the intended effect is there, the film given a certain tactility missing from so many contemporary thrillers like this. Butler continues to validate his young movie star status, waltzing through scenes with a scrappy charm in the early goings before shit hits the fan and he turns into more of a nervous, panicky wreck. He grants Hank a little more emotional clarity than what’s on the page, the script offering a clichéd tragic backstory that informs some corners of the character who once was a promising baseball up-and-comer who now finds himself bartending on the East Side at four in the morning (the movie-length runner about baseball and Hank’s Giants fandom is cute, but also feels somewhat inconsequential). 

It helps that he’s got a surfeit of supporting talent with him on the margins to help flesh out this reality. Kravitz sells her character’s flirty relationship with Hank (and the two have a laudably erotic and stripped-down makeout session, always welcome in a world of movies that seem to drop the idea of sex entirely), as well as her sympathetic and supportive hand as a paramedic helping Hank look for a way out of his current mess. Matt Smith helps inject this with a British crime movie flavor to live alongside the distinctly American setting — think of it as the union of Go and Snatch — but it’s Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio as two seemingly genial but apparently extremely grisly Hebrew mercenaries that Hank eventually ends up in the hands of that help give this some real capital-M Movie credibility, even if by that point the script feels like its flailing wildly in all directions. Add in Hall as a detective who operates somewhere outside the law and some small novel casting additions of Griffin Dunne and Carol Kane, and you’ve got an enterprise that seems to genuinely love the era of filmmaking from which it was spawned. 

Like plenty of those films, Caught Stealing seems mostly made as something to go down relatively easy, despite its gestures toward the gruesome, and there’s only so far this stock brand of impish pulp programmer can take you if it’s not moving the needle on becoming a seismic shift in the culture. That being said, not every movie needs to do that, and this feels like the kind of mid-budget star vehicle movie fans are frothing at the mouth to be released in theaters more often, accomplishing its humble goals with an entertaining proficiency. It may be a copy of a copy, but maybe Aronofsky has a lane in refining B-movie schlock into something of its own entertaining caliber, and not just jerry-built slop to be sent straight to the depths of streaming. If it means no more Whales, I fully support him in this endeavor.

Grade: B

Sony Pictures/Columbia will release Caught Stealing only in theaters on August 29.