"Caught Stealing" Review

In the wake of 1994's Pulp Fiction, Hollweird went into overdrive trying to make quirky crime movies leading to a lot of third-rate Tarantino imitators resulting in mediocre cult flicks like The Boondocks Saints or launching careers of overrated directors like Guy Ritchie with Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. So, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Five it's weird to see Darren Aronofsky (Requiem For A Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) wading in these waters with a movie set in 1998 that tries to feel like a 1998 Pulp Fiction knockoff, Caught Stealing.

Austin Butler as Hank Thompson, a bartender living on NYC's Lower East Side who is tormented by nightmares reliving the auto accident which ended his professional baseball career before it started and killed his best friend. He's got a FWB situation going on with a cute paramedic, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), but his life isn't really going anywhere.

His British next door neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), needs return to London to tend to his ailing father and ropes Hank into watching his cat. One day, he hears pounding at Russ's door and when he goes to see what the hubbub's about, a pair of Russian thugs decide to savagely beat Hank, injuring him so badly he loses a kidney. The thugs eventually break into Russ's apartment and narcotics Det. Roman (Regina King) informs Hank that Russ was a drug dealer connected to a pair of Hasidic Jew brothers, Lipa (Liev Schreiber) and Shmully Drucker (Vincent D'Onofrio), who are warring with the Russians and their Puerto Rican associate, Colorado (Benito Martínez Ocasio, bka Bad Bunny).

If this sounds convoluted to you, it's even worse in practice as it devolves into various twists, double-and-triple-crosses, deaths, etc. to the point you don't even care to keep track of who's doing what to whom. Everyone is so "colorful" but the time where "colorful" was enough wore out its welcome around the time we got sick of hearing about the Y2K Bug.

I'm not sure what attracted Aronofsky to this project. His last film was 2022's The Whale which won Brendan Fraser an Oscar, rebounding from the flop which was 2017's Mother! (which I liked - 6/10 - and actually caught the Biblical allegory which escaped many), but he's not suited for the tonal tightrope you need to walk to make something like Caught Stealing work without becoming chaotic or drowning in cruelty.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.