Having now seen Caught Stealing, I have more compassion for the film’s marketing team, who struggled to cast this latest Darren Aronofsky picture in an effective way. Well made with a talented director behind the camera and a strong performance by budding A-lister Austin Butler, Caught Stealing is a tonally confused crime-thriller-drama with hints of comedy that is entertaining throughout—and yet consistently missing that special something to make it all worthwhile.
Take a scene where Butler’s character is seated between two Orthodox Jewish killers (played by Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio) as he is fed a traditional Jewish meal. In the trailers, the scene is played for laughs; in the movie, it’s not at all. Was it supposed to be funny? Who knows, but I didn’t laugh.
Butler plays a depressed former baseball phenom who finds himself on the wrong side of the Russian mafia when he agrees to watch a neighbor’s cat. A simple good gesture sets off a chain of events involving beatings, murder, and robbery, and deep examinations of past trauma and guilt.
The crime escapades are amusing and unpredictable, though it’s the flashbacks to what happened in the past that make Caught Stealing a tad more compelling—and more in line with the dark and thoughtful fare you’d expect from Aronofsky (Black Swan, The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream). But for the most part the movie plays like an early Guy Ritchie film (think Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) but without the balls-to-the-wall willingness to swing home runs.
The movie is entertaining, no doubt, and Butler elevates a role that so easily could have just been routine, but Aronofsky never entirely finds his footing. Sometimes funny, sometimes dark, sometimes in between, it sort of works but never fully clicks.
Not to put all the blame on her, but Regina King plays an important role despite the character not working much at all. She isn’t right for the part, and the part isn’t right for the movie. King’s character Is just one example of where it seems as though Aronofsky opted to throw too many pieces of lokshen kugel at the wall in hope it would all stick.
Caught Stealing is an amusing piece of fiction, but a notably lesser work for Aronofsky. Even though it goes a bit deeper than similar crime thrillers, its inability to make the most of its many parts makes it more shrug worthy than it should have been. The marketing team did the best it could.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.