Caught Stealing
Austin Butler carries Darren Aronofsky’s bloody, uneven crime caper on sheer star power.
What is it: Burned-out ex-baseball player Hank Thompson unexpectedly finds himself embroiled in a dangerous struggle for survival amidst the criminal underbelly of 1990s New York City, forced to navigate a treacherous underworld he never imagined.
Watch if you like: Snatch, In Bruges, Uncut Gems, Bringing Out the Dead, The Warriors
News and Notes:
Released today
Schmear’s Verdict: Caught Stealing is a violent, messy, and tonally uneven caper, but it’s worth the ride just to watch Austin Butler swagger through late-’90s New York like a true movie star.
Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing is an extremely busy movie: sometimes grim, sometimes frantic, sometimes both at once. It’s overcooked, uneven, a little ridiculous—and yet never boring.
Austin Butler anchors the chaos. After Elvis turned him into an Oscar nominee, here he finally gets to just be himself. No accent or cosplay—just magnetic star power. He plays Hank Thompson, a washed-up baseball prodigy now drowning in booze and bad luck. (Apparently, beer bellies don’t exist in Aronofsky’s world, because Butler’s still chiseled despite guzzling nearly a case a day.)
He has the charisma of an ’80s or ’90s action lead—the Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt type who could elevate a middling movie with sheer presence. That’s what happens here: the movie isn’t great, but Butler makes it worth watching.
The film’s real co-star is New York. Production designer Mark Friedberg nails the late-’90s grime: trash piled on sidewalks, graffiti everywhere, and the kind of downtown that feels dangerous and alive.
Aronofsky and his crew treat the city like a playground. A Chinatown chase through a fish market is sweaty and exhilarating. Later, the action spills into Queens and Brooklyn, turning the film into a borough tour complete with a great Mets-related sequence and a quieter moment on Coney Island. All of it’s powered by a blistering Idles soundtrack that keeps the film’s pulse high and erratic.
But Aronofsky gonna Aronofsky. The movie is soaked in violence—so much blood and nastiness it can be numbing. The first act in particular is a slog: oppressive, miserable, and full of Aronofsky emotional terrorism for no discernible reason.
It loosens up, veering into slapstick absurdity that eventually clicks. A highlight: Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio as Hasidic gunmen, with Carol Kane as their bubbe, hosting a Shabbat dinner with a delicious-looking matzah ball soup. A lowlight: whatever Bad Bunny is doing here. When Caught Stealing is less punishment and more caper, it sings.
That delicate tone puts it somewhere between prime Guy Ritchie and old Quentin Tarantino: not as fun as the former, not as sharp as the latter, but messy enough to keep you watching. And for all its flaws, I walked out satisfied.
Caught Stealing won’t win Oscars, but it delivers the rare thrill of watching a movie star carry a messy, mid-budget crime flick on charisma alone—a phenomenon I kind of miss. It’s violent, loud, and over the top, yet oddly refreshing.
I won’t think about it again, but I’ll admit to grinning, a few times, at the audacity of it all.
