Movie Review: Caught Stealing

3 stars out of 5

I’ve seen Caught Stealing, once, when I was 55. Whoops I mean 56.

Hi Darren Aronofsky. Big fan. Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, The Wrestler, Mother!: awesome. The Whale, Noah: pretty good. The Fountain was incomprehensible garbage but, hey, you tried.

Caught Stealing is… average. Innocent likable guy gets mixed up with gangsters and things get wacky. It stinks of Hollywood formula. And that is not you, Darren Aronofsky! You are unafraid to take chances. You are willfully weird. That’s what we like about you.

I am not blaming you. You did not write this movie. Charlie Huston did. I don’t know who that is, but I was hoping he was a grandson of John Huston. He is not. He wrote a novel and turned that novel into a screenplay. But you directed it, Darren. And it’s your name that got me into the theater. OK I guess I am blaming you.

Austin Butler is our likable protagonist. He’s a bartender in 1998 NYC. Hey I spent a lot of time in NYC bars in 1998, this could be right up my alley! He loves the San Francisco Giants and his girlfriend is Zoe Kravitz. Wasn’t she great in The Studio! They have great chemistry and I wish they had more scenes together.

Austin gets mixed up with Russian gangsters and there is tension and Regina King is a police detective and things are going pretty well, movie-wise. But then things start to get silly. This worked in Anora but it doesn’t work here. Maybe madcap comedy isn’t in Aronofsky’s wheelhouse. Maybe his heart wasn’t in it. The movie really starts to drag.

Then it picks up a little. This is mostly thanks to Liev Schreiber and an unrecognizable Vincent D’Onofrio as Hasidic gangsters, and Carol Kane as their mom. This is the quirkiness the film had previously been lacking. (Griffin Dunne has a small role and I think that wild seedy After Hours NYC energy is what they were hoping to replicate.) And the plot plays out with a decent ending that didn’t make me yell “Feh!” at the screen. It’s watchable, and kind of fun, but you can certainly wait till it’s streaming. Aronofsky, please write a fucked-up screenplay and direct it and make it theater-worthy. Thank you.