Caught Stealing: A Review – A Criminally Awful Movie

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An instantly forgettable and irritatingly moronic movie that when it isn’t being incoherent is idiotic.

Caught Stealing, directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Austin Butler, is a “black comedy crime thriller” that follows the travails of Hank (Butler), a former baseball player turned alcoholic bartender who unwittingly gets mixed up with a bevy of New York criminal gangs. 

I vividly remember twenty-five years ago seeing director Darren Aronofsky’s film Requiem for a Dream (2000) - a gritty and cinematic examination of addiction, and immediately thinking, “this guy is gonna be something!”

A quarter of a century later I have been proven absolutely correct in my assessment, Aronofsky has become “something”, but unfortunately the “something” he has become is the feckless hack who made Caught Stealing, one of the more abysmal and idiotic films of the year.

It didn’t have to be this way. Aronofsky, a graduate of the esteemed AFI Conservatory, started out making ambitious arthouse fare like PI (1998), and then graduated to ambitious arthouse projects with some crossover mainstream appeal, such as the previously mentioned Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain (2006), The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010).

All of these movies were very good…but never quite touched upon greatness…but what they did most of all was showcase Aronofsky’s potential. They left cinephile/film bros like me with the feeling that Aronofsky was going to make the leap one day and become THE GUY.

In 2014 Aronofsky attempted to make that leap to even more mainstream success than he had with The Wrestler and Black Swan, with the big budget movie Noah (2014) starring Russell Crowe – based on the biblical tale.

Noah was a very moderate box office success (it made $359 million - essentially breaking even due to its large budget), but it was a horrendously awful film – just utter garbage from start to finish.

It was at this point that the Aronofsky film bro bubble burst like the deluge that flooded the earth in Noah.

Following Noah, Aronofsky made Mother! (2019), a very ambitious, dare I say experimental, arthouse film starring Jennifer Lawrence (at the height of her powers), and it was universally panned and flopped at the box office. The wheels seemed to be off the wagon at that point.

Aronofsky’s most recent film was The Whale (2022) a truly insipid piece of dramatic detritus that won Brendan Fraser a Best Actor Oscar (yes, that really happened despite all of us forgetting about it…or trying to forget about it).

Despite Aronofsky’s failings on Noah, Mother! and The Whale, at least he was trying…failing but trying. With Caught Stealing, it feels as if the wheels aren’t just off the Aronofsky wagon, but the wheelless wagon is overturned in a ditch and Aronofsky is next to it curled in fetal position weeping uncontrollably in a pile of horse manure.

For such a promising talent like Aronofsky to make such a dead-eyed, instantly forgettable, truly idiotic piece of trash like Caught Stealing isn’t just disappointing, it is frightening. I mean, if he could fall so low as to make this movie, how low could the rest of us fall in our own lives? Yes, I am sure Aronofsky was paid more to make this movie than I’ve ever made in my entire life…but you get my point.

Caught Stealing is lazy and stupid and useless. It is a “black comedy” that is allergic to being funny. It is a crime thriller devoid of thrills.

The script, written by Charlie Huston - based upon his book of the same name, is incoherent and moronic. There are all sorts of incomprehensible plot twists and a cornucopia of caricatures in place of characters, and none of it makes sense or even remotely captivates or compels.

The performances all feel like something out of a sixth-grade talent show.

Austin Butler is supposed to be the next big thing. I was believing the hype on young Austin, as I thought he was good in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Elvis, and Dune II. But let me tell you…after seeing Butler’s star turn in Caught Stealing I have come to realize he ain’t no burgeoning movie star. He might be a successful supporting actor type guy, but he can’t carry a movie to save his life.

Butler is brutally bad as Hank. He is obviously hampered by the trite and inane script, but Butler does himself no favors with a lifeless and mannered performance. He is so devoid of charisma and screen presence they would’ve been better served casting an inanimate carbon rod in the role instead.

Other once promising actors find themselves wallowing in the same shit script as Butler…as Regina King, Zoe Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Griffin Dune, Carol Kane and my old friend Vincent D’Onofrio all turn in gruesomely amateurish performances that sully their reputations.

Caught Stealing bombed at the box office, making $32 million on a $65 million budget, and is now streaming on Netflix, which is where I saw it. The film runs an hour and forty-seven minutes, and is right at home among the usual mindless Netflix slop. This is the type of movie you watch while scrolling on your phone or while having sex with your girlfriend on the couch after your parents go to bed early.

I wish Darren Aronofsky was good. I wanted Darren Aronofsky to be great. But Darren Aronofsky isn’t good and he isn’t great…he’s the guy who made the thoughtless, mindless, worthless Caught Stealing. How disheartening.

©2025

The Whale: A Review - The Whale Beaches Itself on its Hyper-Theatricality

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. You’d be better off stuffing your pie-hole with guliver-expanding, artery-clogging garbage for two hours than watching this hyper-theatrical dud.

The Whale, written by Samuel D. Hunter (based upon his play of the same name) and directed by Darren Aronofsky, tells the story of Charlie, a morbidly obese online English professor suffering from congestive heart failure. The film stars Brendan Fraser, who was nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards for his work as Charlie, with supporting turns from Hong Chau, Sadie Sink and Samantha Morton.

The Whale is a comeback movie of sorts for both Brendan Fraser, whose career careened into oblivion as he aged out of being the handsome guy some years back, and Darren Aronofsky, who was once one of the most promising filmmakers of his generation but who has stumbled in his last two cinematic outings with the abysmal duds Noah (2014) and Mother! (2017).

The result of the comeback bid is a mixed bag as The Whale is a major disappointment of a film, and the blame for that lies squarely with Aronofsky and with Samuel Hunter’s script, but on the bright side, Brendan Fraser may just have rejuvenated his career with his sad sack, fat suit wearing performance in the movie.

I must say, I didn’t find anything cinematically redeeming in The Whale, not even Fraser’s performance, but I think Fraser has presented himself as a likeable person on the marketing and awards circuit and that may lead to future substantial work for him. Whether he’s up to the task in that work is certainly open for debate.

The Whale is a movie that yearns to be prestige but which is so theatrically written and executed that it feels like a very sub-par stage play from an overly confident, first-time playwrite you’d regret paying to see in some off-off-off Broadway hole in the wall.

The setting for the film is almost exclusively the dim confines of Charlie’s apartment. The action consists of his visitors, from his nurse Liz (Hing Chau), to a missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) to his long-lost daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) and ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton), coming and going.

Due to Hunter’s cringe dialogue and Aronofsky’s stagey and/or laissez-faire direction, all of these actors give mannered and contrived performances. None of the characters they portray feel like real people, but rather like caricatures used solely as plot devices.

Sadie Sink is an actress I think has a very promising future, but her work as Ellie is so heightened and performative as to be distracting and laughable.

Hong Chau fares better than Sink but she too misses the mark with her incomprehensible Liz.

And Ty Simpkins’ character Thomas makes no sense and is a dramatic disaster, which is mostly due to the bad script but also aided by Simpkins’ tepid performance.

But the main failure on The Whale is Darren Aronofsky. Aronofsky’s direction is so awkward, clumsy and inept as to be disheartening. If I saw one more scene where a character walked to the door, then stopped and turned around and made some declaration…or walked to the door, opened it, stepped out, then stopped, turned around and made some declaration…or if I saw one more scene where a character crossed “the stage” and the camera counter-crossed…I was going to binge eat carbs until I spontaneously combusted.

In addition to that artless, theatrical staging, Aronofsky’s choice to confine most, but not all, of the action in Charlie’s apartment, but not limit the film’s perspective to just Charlie, is a grating and self-defeating one.

For this type of black box, arthouse movie to succeed, in needed to be a laser focused character study examining Charlie and his experiences alone. Instead, Aronofsky gives us side stories and scenes between undeveloped characters that feel like filler and dramatic distractions. These side-scenes drain any dramatic momentum the sorry story ever generated.

Aronofsky is a filmmaker I’ve long rooted for and admired. After seeing his first two films, Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000), I thought he really had a chance to be a special artist.

Even his third film, The Fountain (2006), which was a more ambitious project but which ultimately failed, contained much promise and kept my hope alive.

His fourth and fifth films, The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010), seemed to indicate he had found his artistic groove and creative style with small budget, gritty character studies starring big name actors.

But then he went with a big budget project, Noah (2014), with Russell Crowe starring in the biblical epic. The result was a mammoth misfire both creatively and financially.

His follow up film was Mother! (2017), an ambitious and audacious meditation on humanity/horror story that was simultaneously too tightly and too loosely woven. Mother!, which was one of the more disorienting and aggravating movies in recent memory, was rightfully panned and flopped at the box office despite starring Jennifer Lawrence, who was maybe the biggest movie star in the world at the time.

And now we have The Whale. What is so disheartening about The Whale is not that it’s a misfire, but that it’s so poorly made as to be shocking. Aronofsky’s promising career has become as bloated and artistically unhealthy as the morbidly obese, compulsive eater Charlie. It’s difficult to imagine Aronofsky righting the ship after three cinematic disasters in a row, but who knows? I certainly hope he does, but I’m not optimistic.

As for Brendan Fraser as Charlie, he is…fine. Fraser has the requisite sad eyes to engender pity beneath his enormous fat suit, but beyond that he doesn’t really bring much to the table.

The thing that is lost amongst the recent Fraser renaissance, is that he was never a good actor to begin with. His claim to fame is playing empty-headed lugs and second-rate action-hero roles. He isn’t exactly Olivier, and this fact makes me think his sympathy-fueled comeback will be short-lived.

That said, he has a legit chance to win a Best Actor Oscar, and that should at least help him to make a living in the next couple of years. Does he deserve the award? Frankly…no. But most people who win Oscars don’t deserve them either…what can you do?

In conclusion, The Whale is another in an expanding list of recent sub-par Darren Aronofsky films as well as another in a gargantuan line of awful movies from 2022. I watched this movie so you don’t have to…and trust me, you really don’t have to.

©2023