Hank is in a whole heap of trouble.

It all started a decade ago when Hank, drunk behind the wheel, brought his promising baseball career to a crashing halt. Now he tends bar in New York’s Lower East Side, where he has ample opportunity to continue his drinking days without worry of getting behind the wheel. But Hank is in trouble again, and a wild night is once again the culprit. In another movie, these two scenes might function like echoes, an overarching lesson that connects the narrative tissue in between. In yet another movie, these two intoxicated incidents might just be a coincidence and nothing more—two unhappy accidents that happen to pull the main character through the muck. Both are too deep for Caught Stealing. Here, the narrative opts for a third option: laziness.

With a script by Charlie Huston—adapted from his novel—and direction by Darren Aronofsky, Caught Stealing is a dull couple of hours at the movies, pointlessly riddled with violence, and punctuated by jokes and insights that fall flat.

Austen Butler plays Hank, a puppy dog drunk with an athlete’s physique. He agrees to cat-sit for his next-door neighbor (Matt Smith), and, from there, the bad encounters start piling up. The neighbor is in deep with the Ukrainian mob (Nikita Kukushkin and Yuri Kolokolnikov), a corrupt cop (Reginal King), and two Hasidic hit men (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio). Naturally, Hank is caught in the middle, gets beaten up a lot, loses a kidney, and becomes the reason just about everyone near and dear to him gets killed. At least the cat (Tonic) makes out, though even he doesn’t emerge unscathed.

Set in the late 1990s, Caught Stealing looks like it could be a period piece—smoking, weathered minivans, pay phones—but feels more like a movie from 1999 that was released, buried, and reemerged 25 years later to little acclaim. That might account for the sluggish plot, which requires an awful lot of meaningless exposition, and the constant exploitation of Hank’s fateful car accident. It’s the kind of movie I imagine a lot of film school students envisioned making after seeing The Boondock Saints and a couple of Guy Ritchie flicks. That it is the product of a published novelist and a filmmaker with a genuinely solid track record, and exists in 2025, is baffling.

Caught Stealing (2025)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Screenplay by Charlie Huston, based on his novel
Produced by Darren Aronofsky, Jeremy Dawson, Dylan Golden, Ari Handel
Starring: Austin Butler, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Regina King, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Benito Martínez Ocasio, Nikita Kukushkin, Yuri Kolokolnikov
Columbia Pictures, Rated R, Running time 107 minutes, Opens Aug. 29, 2025

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