Film Review: Caught Stealing

Caught Stealing
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Protozoa Pictures
In Theaters: 08.29.2025

It’s always interesting to see an auteur step out of their comfort zone and try something new, and for roughly 27 years, Darren Aronofsky’s comfort zone has been firmly rooted in discomfort. The filmmaker who gave us Requiem For A Dream and Black Swan hasn’t made fun a high priority in his films. Caught Stealing appears to be the director’s attempt to cut loose and make a popcorn flick, while staying largely true to who he is as an artist. 

Caught Stealing takes place in 1998 (the year Aronofsky made his mark with Pi), and follows Hank Thompson (Austin Butler, Elvis, The Bikeriders), a once-promising high school baseball star whose real career ended before it ever began, thanks to a life-changing car accident. Now he pours drinks at a dive bar in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, follows his favorite major league team’s underdog pennant chase and is building a romance with Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz, The Batman), a smart, sassy and sultry paramedic who is quite skilled at reading his vital signs. When Hank’s eccentric, British punk-rock neighbor Russ (Matt Smith, Doctor Who, Last Night in Soho) asks him to watch his cat during a trip abroad, Hank’s quiet routine shatters as he’s pulled into the middle of something sinister. Rival gangs descend on Hank, convinced he possesses something valuable and his only ally is a hard-nosed cop, Detective Ronan (Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk). Surrounded by bullets, chaos and threats he can’t understand, the former baseball prodigy must hit harder and run faster to cover all the bases and make it home safely.

Caught Stealing moves at a brisk pace, clocking in at a lean 107-minute runtime, and it’s a well-executed “race against time and outrun the bad guys” crime thriller. It’s also highly predictable and lacking in any particular sense of originality, owing more than a little to half a dozen Guy Ritchie slackers in peril movies. Aronofsky shows that he can skillfully stage a chase scene without getting ridiculous, and he’s got a flair for action, previously demonstrated in Noah. The director stays quite restrained when it comes to stylistic flair and forays into surrealism, with the latter consisting mostly of cutting to traumatic — and at times graphic — flashbacks of the car accident somewhere between 8 and 42 times. 

There’s enough manic energy and twists and turns here to be fairly entertaining, yet Caught Stealing is an extreme example of why the “last person standing” thriller never quite works: At some point, the brutal, collateral damage body count becomes too high for merely seeing the protagonist survive to constitute a happy ending. Caught Stealing crosses over that line before the plot even kicks into high gear, and our investment in the movie rests rather on Hank being the point of view character: It’s a game, Hank is the player character, and if he dies, it’s game over. This makes it highly problematic that Aronofsky constantly undermines Hank’s status as the point of view character by including frequent dialogue in Russian, Spanish, Yiddish and other languages that Hank doesn’t understand, though we’re clued in via the magic of subtitles (despite the fact that not a single line spoken in any of the languages is needed to follow the story). Some of these moments are meant to provide comic relief, but none are amusing enough to justify this variation on breaking the fourth wall.Each and every time it took me out of the reality and lessened my investment in the intensity of the situation. It’s debatable whether Aronofsky is breaking any rules of cinematic language that are written in stone, but it’s a clumsy, lazy, stupid and surprisingly amateur directing choice.

Butler is a highly charismatic presence, yet even his boyish charm isn’t enough to keep us rooting for Hank without throwing in a cat that he has to protect in order to identify him as the good guy. The ensemble is giving it everything they’ve got, with Kravitz and King in a three-way competition with the aforementioned cat for MVP. Smith is having fun playing against type as the caustic poser Russ, Vincent D’Onofrio (Full Metal Jacket, Daredevil) and Liev Schreiber (The Sum of All Fears, Ray Donovan) are scene-stealers as Schmully and Lipa Drucker, a pair of Hasidic hitters, and Carol Kane (Unbreakable Kimmy Scmidt, Between The Temples) makes the whole movie in a cameo as their Bubbe. Benito A. Martínez Ocasio, better known as rapper Bad Bunny, appears as a Puerto Rican tough guy named Colorado, and while it’s a competent performance, it’s just stunt casting.

Caught Stealing is, thankfully, a lot less pretentious and gimmicky than The Whale, and it’s the kind of movie that is just dark, violent, crass and superficially enjoyable enough that it will likely develop a certain following. I found it to be too grim to be escapist fun and too slight to be anything else, trying to blend thriller with farce and never quite succeeding at either. It’s a must-see for diehard Aronofsky fans, and if you’re really craving an urban thriller, it gets the job done. Still, it’s hardly a crime to skip this one, and most audiences will be just fine letting Caught Stealing go right on by and feel no need to chase it down. —Patrick Gibbs

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