In Caught Stealing, it’s New York City in 1998 and Austin Butler is baseball-hopeful-turned-alcoholic Hank, who works as a bartender and dates paramedic-pixie-dream-girl Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz). Hank’s British punk rocker neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith), asks him to catsit, which inadvertently throws Hank into the treacherous underworld of crime, where he encounters a detective (Regina King), violent Russian thugs, a Puerto Rican drug dealer (Benito Martínez Ocasio aka Bad Bunny), and a duo of Hasidic Jews (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio).

The premise of Caught Stealing is pretty basic: a guy gets roped into something way beyond what he can handle, and he has to try to survive and solve the situation. It’s something we’ve seen many times before, but with Darren Aronofsky at the helm, I was expecting a little more depth—something unique or grim or weird or moving.

Instead, we get what basically feels like a grimier Guy Ritchie movie with nothing particularly special or memorable to say. It’s bloody—the violence feels truly violent—and it leans into being grungy in ways that feel authentic to the New York of the late 1990s, but it fails to achieve that After Hours tension and weirdness it could have gone for.

You would think that all these interesting characters would make Caught Stealing feel fresh and thrilling, but that’s not exactly the case because, despite having unique characteristics on paper, they all start to feel rather samey. Everyone makes dumb decisions that push the plot forward at the expense of feeling motivated by character. Everyone is a psychopath who might flash a smile just as easily as they would pull a gun. 

Aside from liking baseball and feeling guilty about an incident in his past, I can’t tell you any other major personality traits for Hank. Similarly with Yvonne, we know she’s a hot girl, a paramedic, and she likes cats, but she’s so underwritten that she feels like a first draft. All the characters are physically distinct—from Smith’s mohawk to Bad Bunny’s swag—but no character has enough uniqueness or quirks to make them feel memorable.

Because no one is fleshed out and we can’t get invested in any of the characters, the overall story in Caught Stealing lacks engagement. It’s clear the film was aiming for something clever, sexy, and fast-paced, but none of that quite materializes in the end results. We’re presented with a somewhat stylish movie that looks good in clips, but fails to come together into something fresh, exciting, special, or unique.