Caught Stealing found guilty of ripping off better movies

A director with arthouse sensibilities going more commercial is always worth writing home about.

Caught Stealing is the most noble of films; not good enough to be released for Oscar season, but not notable enough to be released at the height of summer.

The late summer film is where the majority of two-to-three-star films reside, and Caught Stealing fills that role with aplomb.

There is something noble about a film like this getting a cinema release in 2025; films like these usually end up punted to Netflix and get buried deep in the algorithm.

In the industry, films like Caught Stealing are called “programmers”; films you can just slot into a timetable and hope people walk up and buy a ticket because an actor they like is in it.

Without any sense of irony on our part, these are the kinds of films that cinemas need to survive.

As a culture, films like this are the glue that cinemas need; the three-star “yeah, that was alright,” film you see exactly once and never think about again.

Caught Stealing sees Darren Aronofsky direct Austin Butler in a late summer romp that owes a lot to the Martin Scorsese classic After Hours.

Suffice it to say, Darren Aronofsky is no Martin Scorsese.

Butler is a former aspiring baseball star who has fallen on hard times and is entrusted to look after his criminal friends’ cat.

Said friend, played by Matt Smith, is a wanted man who has gangsters bearing down on him, leading to Butler being dragged into the middle of a crime story.

Butler’s performance as Elvis Presley made him a global star in 2022, ruining his voice in the process and forever making him the butt of jokes that he will always sound like Elvis no matter what movie he does.

Between this film and The Bikeriders, Butler has etched out a good niche for himself; he is eerily reminiscent of the recently departed Val Kilmer.

Michael Mann reportedly wants Butler to play a younger version of Kilmer’s character in a sequel to Heat; this film is a decent audition for it.

Butler has the leading man looks and charisma, but he also has that edge which made Kilmer so compelling at his peak.

Caught Stealing has a really solid cast for a film that doesn’t really have any aspirations beyond being a late summer programmer.

Butler heads the cast, with Zoe Kravitz, Regina King, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Bad Bunny, Carol Kane, Vincent D’Onofrio, and, just to close the After Hours loop, Griffin Dunne.

The solid cast can be attributed to everyone wanting to work with Darren Aronofsky.

The 2022 Oscar season saw a rake of Dublin talent – namely Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan – all nominated for Oscars for Banshees Of Inisherin, with Kildare man Paul Mescal receiving his first nomination for Aftersun.

Dublin 15 and Kildare both faced off in Best Actor, but it was Brendan Fraser who walked away with the Best Actor Oscar that year for The Whale.

Darren Aronofsky engineered a comeback for Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler and won Natalie Portman an Oscar for Black Swan; he worked his magic again with The Whale, securing an Oscar for Fraser.

One slight problem; The Whale was a shambolic film that had as much insight as a fortune cookie, and Fraser’s win was an example of people voting for the comeback narrative instead of the performance.

If the Oscars were actually judged on merit, the Oscar would have gone to Colin Farrell that year, or the other nominee in Best Actor that year, Austin Butler.

The Whale was such a misjudged, laughable film that it called Aronofsky’s entire career into doubt; was this guy faking it all along?

There’s a sense that Aronofsky signed on to make this film as a challenge, to prove to people that he isn’t just the Oscar-bait guy.

Caught Stealing is pretty unapologetically a commercial play for Aronofsky, and by all accounts, he does a solid, if unremarkable, job proving that he can still make a normal movie.

Punk band IDLES doing the score for the film is the most Aronofsky touch; it makes sense that the most Brewdog faux-punk band does music for the most Brewdog faux-punk director.

Caught Stealing is set in 1998, which means we hear snippets of the cool hits of the day – Garbage, Portishead, Semisonic are all accounted for – and it also adds some nice flavour to the movie.

Because the movie is set in the era of Jerry Springer, voicemails play a big part in the plot, and people can’t reach each other easily using a mobile phone.

For a movie set in 1998, Caught Stealing feels like those knock-off Tarantinos that Hollywood made 50 of in the wake of Pulp Fiction.

Caught Stealing has none of the imagination or spark that makes films like After Hours or Pulp Fiction good; it’s like the ChatGPT version.

The tone is all over the place; Matt Smith thinks he’s in a sketch comedy version of a Guy Ritchie movie, and Regina King treats the film like she’s in an episode of Homicide: Life On The Street.

One minute, the movie features cat poop as a major plot point and the audience is meant to laugh; a few scenes later, a character is brutally murdered with all the callousness of a Peckinpah film.

We’ve seen films balance tonal shifts before – for a recent frame of reference, Weapons balances comedy and horror in a really clever way – but in Caught Stealing, the tone is all over the place like someone trying to control an errant water hose.

As we mentioned, however, these are the kinds of films that you’ll miss when studios stop putting them in cinemas.

Sometimes, you just want to watch a serviceable movie on a big screen and not check your phone for two hours.

Caught Stealing does just that.