Darren Aronofsky directs Caught Stealing, a crime thriller packaged as a fresh, hip spin on late 90s grungy New York that doesn't exist anymore. I know because I was there, living in the same Lower Eastside neighborhood (Avenue A and 2nd St) as Henry (Austin Butler), our bartender protagonist from a small town California, in 1998. Aronofsky creates authentic grimy Giuliani years of LES quite convincingly. Look, there's Benny's Burritos, there's Kim's Video, Paul's Bar looks very much like Sophie's, a roach motel of a bar that after all these years, still nestled in 4th and Ave A & B where I had my first date with my wife to be.
Henry gets into trouble just because he lives next door to an English punk, Russ (Matt Smith), who might be involved in a lot of illegal activities. Russ says his dad is dying and he has to go back home. Can Henry take care of his tabby cat? Henry reluctantly agrees. And all hell breaks loose.
Ukrainian mob goons, a pair of Hasid hitmen (drolly played by Liev Schriber and Vincent D'Onofrio), there's Bad Bunny as Colorado, a Puerto Rican gangster, a corrupt cop (Regina King), everyone wants a piece of Russ and therefore Henry, even though Henry is a merely an innocent bystander. And Zoë Kravitz plays a thankless role as Henry's girlfriend who gets killed off early in the movie.
So is this all a nostalgia trip? Caught Stealing is so by the book and characters so stereotypical, I couldn't even enjoy it as a walk-down-the-memory-lane. Even though Henry's misadventure takes you to far corners of New York - not only the Lower East Side, but to Flushing Meadows and Coney Island, because the story is so bland and generic, and Henry's coulda been Major League ball player looking for redemption back story is so lame, there's nothing really you can hold on to emotionally.
And once you get into nitty gritty details, all the authenticity the movie tries to convey falls apart - how can a bartender afford an apartment that size, by himself, without roomies? How does his medic girlfriend afford a spacious Chinatown (Oxymoron anyone) apartment? I had three jobs and was living in a shoebox with a roommate.
By the unsurprising conclusion that is just as corny as Shyamalan's "Swing away, Merrill," one could wonder, are Aronofsky and writer Charlie Huston going for the whole nostalgia trip? Caught Stealing can be set present day or any other time in New York city's checkered history. Sure there's a talk of gentrification, Giuliani and Mets, but no one in the movie seems to be affected by them at all. There are superior NY set movies that accentuate the era of New York much better - The Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis (60s) and Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead (mid-90s). Are we seriously expected to be sympathetic to a main character who is so uncharismatic that the only distinctive quality he has is that he's a SF Giants fan? What are his goals? What are his ambitions? What is he interested in? Is he just a good looking guy? Matt Smith nails the Brit punk stereotype. Schreiber and D'Onofrio do their thing. But none of the characters have any depth. Caught Stealing is a less flashier and muted version of Snatch which just happens to be set in the 90s New York with no other reasons than banking on nostalgia only on a purely superficial level.
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