Austin Butler Emerges Bruised and Battered in Director Darren Aronofsky’s Mainstream-ish Curveball
DIRECTED BY DARREN ARONOFSKY/2025
From its marketing to its closing credits, Caught Stealing line-drives the notion that its director Darren Aronofsky- auteur artisan of such titles as Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, and Mother!– has made {gasp} a Guy Ritchie film. In a more interesting world, it would be the other way around. But alas, here we are….
Packed to its grimy seams with eccentric bassasses, short-fused oddballs, flippant law enforcement (Regina King), and ruthless killers (including two murderous Hasidic brothers played by Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio), Caught Stealing relocates much of Ritchie’s recognizable Brit zest for swaggering criminals and foul-mouthed dopes to New York City. It’s 1998, so no smartphones, barely any internet, and for these lowlife characters, not even airbags in their crappy cars. Which sucks for them, as car crashes are an important part of this movie.
Austin Butler (Elvis) stars as Hank Thompson, a washed-up thirty-something with alcoholic tendencies and penchant for getting beaten up. Butler, who is part Brad Pitt, part James Franco, but probably better than both (though this isn’t the project for such determinations), is uncommonly ripped for someone languishing in his station in life. But then again, we’re reminded again and again that once upon a better time, maaaasany years ago, he was the golden-hued MVP of his school’s baseball team. Sadly, a sudden tragedy upended all of that, leaving him to tailspin into an urban oblivion of vague illegal-adjacent activity and dorky obsessive fandom for the San Francisco Giants. Every phone call with his mother ends in earnest with “Go Giants”. (An aside… pitting the showcasing of Butler’s pointlessly chiseled physique against Brandon Fraser’s extremely overweight self-flagelator in Aronofsky’s previous feature, The Whale, perhaps the filmmaker truly does harbor the kind of body-idealism that garnered him fat-shaming criticism a few years ago…?)
It’s entirely justified to label Caught Stealing a dark comedy, even as it takes shockingly sobering steps to occasionally rattle viewers out of any escapist firmament. Likewise, this, by default, is Aronofsky’s most mainstream film, although one can’t help but wonder what manner of bizarre intellectual exercise/commentary/art experiment he’s actually indulging in here within the confines of his own fevered mind. Perhaps to his credit, that is never clear. Still, the memory lingers of Aronofsky being on track to adapt the popular animated series Batman Beyond to the big screen, only to see him pivot and make things like the strangest possible adaptation the story of Noah’s Ark instead.
Butler does a good job of carrying this not-bad movie, even selling us on his eventual character arc… something I must admit I did not see coming. His character Hank finds himself smack in the middle of a violent competition over attaining a key to a storage facility full of cash. His mohawked punk rocker neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), seems tuned into the fortune’s whereabouts in more ways than one. Intimidating thugs routinely invade their apartment building looking to rough up Russ and get some answers. When Russ is unavailable, Hank tends to suffice for these beatings. Hank doesn’t know much about any of this, but at least Mel Gibson would be proud of his pain tolerance.
Hank’s girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), the most practically minded and grounded individual in Caught Stealing, can only tend to so many of Hank’s inflicted wounds. She wants him to commit to their relationship (and isn’t above “bad judgment” hook-ups with him, as we see), but his affections seem more focused on the bad, biting cat he’s taking care of. (Lone animals are a staple of movies like this, though this grumpy feline does not seem thrilled about any it).
Hank’s inability to rise to the occasion yet somehow stay alive is what makes Caught Stealing ever-so-different within its niche, and also ultimately fuels his eventual character arc. (An early takeaway: sports obsessives are boring people). Packed with ‘90s nostalgia tunes and familiar tropes that Aronofsky isn’t afraid to stomp on every now and then, this bruised caper might just be a corner turned for both its director and its star. Or, maybe it’s just an off-road swerve. Whatever, man.