REEL | Austin Butler Gets 'Caught Stealing' Back in 1998 NYC

"I depend on your poor judgment."

Sony Pictures / Protozoa Pictures

A drunk but athletic Austin Butler stars in director Darren Aronofsky's brutal, late-'90s New York crime caper, Caught Stealing, about a washed-out, former baseball prospect getting tied up in the intersection of the Russian, Jewish, and Puerto Rican criminal underworld, based on the novel of the same name by author Charlie Huston, who also wrote the film's script.

Butler's Hank basically stumbles into all kinds of trouble when his punk rocker neighbour, a leather-clad and mohawked Matt Smith, skips town while holding other people's money without a trace. It does get a bit tiring watching Butler constantly get beaten up for basically doing nothing just as his wildly sexy paramedic girlfriend (Zoë Kravitz) handles his nonsense with grace before being unceremoniously sidelined. Aronofsky does frame his protagonist like a true movie star, giving his physical performance a notable spotlight and plenty of glamour contrasted with the violent seediness of the pulp material.

When Hank fails to dig himself out of the hole others leave him in, the likes of Regina King, Bad Bunny, Liev Schreiber, and Vincent D'Onofrio as various cops and criminals show up to further threaten his life while he gets way over his head. Despite the relatively brisk hundred-minute runtime, it's tiring witnessing Hank deal with so much trauma in the span of a few days amidst the nostalgic mid-Giuliani era of the city cleaning itself up in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Caught Stealing harkens back to the late twentieth-century's style of pulp storytelling but with a clear cruel streak. Butler is a fine vessel for New York's changing street-level culture, but his character proves to be too irredeemable to be worth all the violence he indirectly causes. It's an amusing but implausible ride back to 1998 NYC told in a Guy Ritchie kinetic style, yet there's just not enough there there, especially with a major league cast batting below their talent level.


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