Caught Stealing

Grade: C+

There are two persistently recurrent through-lines in Caught Stealing. One, involving a cat, reminded me (with weariness) of Argylle. The other, which I found quite amusing, involves the lead character’s obsession with baseball. By the end, after he has endured so much that he never anticipated or signed up for, there’s no doubt that he will plan his life around the game schedule on TV. No matter what’s going on, he is never too injured, time-crunched, stressed, or busy to talk to people about baseball. Every phone conversation ends with “Go Giants.” A frantic call to his mother (who shares this passion) has him telling her “some people who are after me know where you live. You need to get out of the house! Go to a friend’s place or something! ……well, you’ll just have to watch the game over there. Sorry. Love you. Go Giants.”

What else did I like? They did a great job filming New York City. If you love the city, it successfully takes you there. Director Darren Aronofsky (The Whale, Mother!, Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream, Pi) has staged a few entertainingly frenetic fight/action sequences. A gross torture scene with the movie’s best comic relief had me laughing and cringing at the same time. Austin Butler is an appealing star, and the stacked cast includes several recognizable faces like Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Griffin Dunne, and Carol Kane.

It’s unfortunate that ultimately, Caught Stealing is a slog. Butler plays Hank, who, earlier in life, had some serious aspirations to be a professional you-know-what player – but on a day-drinking, joy-riding afternoon, crashed his car, killing his best friend and hurting himself. The legal and physical repercussions put that dream to rest. Cut to NYC in 1998, where he is working at a modest but busy dive bar. His neighbor down the hall needs to leave town to visit his ailing father, and calls upon Hank to babysit his cat. This neighbor friend looks and sounds like he just stepped out of one of those Guy Ritchie crime films with fast-talking, mush-mouthed undecipherable thick accents. He is also caught up in some unsavory business with unsavory people, and through stretchy plot contrivances, Hank unwittingly gets wrapped up in all of that. I’m really not sure why.

This is where the machinery takes over, and Caught Stealing loses any life it had. Details upon details get dumped on us. I stopped listening after a certain point. To the degree that I could keep them straight, I didn’t care much. Less would have been more. A couple of my favorite characters don’t make it to the end of the movie. I hate to harp on this yet again, but Butler’s character is able to move around, run, fight, and overall function awfully well despite what should be some debilitating physical setbacks.

After glimpses of promising directions it could have gone, the movie’s third act settles into action autopilot. Not all of it is bad. When Hank has to “be” somebody else (long story), Butler is very convincing in the way he throws himself into this other role. I enjoyed the surprise cameo at the very end. After just hearing somebody’s voice throughout the whole film, we finally see the owner. Otherwise, Caught Stealing – after much vacillation between liking and disliking it – had the ball landing in the strike zone, as a swing and a miss.

Grade: C+