Caught Stealing

A former baseball prodigy, and current alcoholic fuckup, now working as a bartender in a dive bar, gets in over his head with multiple dangerous criminals after doing a simple favor for his neighbor.

Caught Stealing is the movie adaptation of the book Caught Stealing, which is a crime novel by the American author Charlie Huston, published in 2005. The book is told in first-person narration by the main character Henry “Hank” Thompson, a bartender in New York City who becomes embroiled in a struggle between several criminals. It’s the first book in the Henry Thompson Series, and is then followed up by Six Bad Things and A Dangerous Man, and it’s pretty much your as-expected textbook classic first-person POV debut novel by a white male author, one that is obviously (at least partially) based somewhat on the author’s own personal experiences, that it, until the guns come out.

I read the whole trilogy, and while at this point, I don’t really recall all that much, I do remember that it was pretty brutal, and also that the hero mostly gets beaten up a lot. Like, a lot. Maybe too much, after awhile. Regardless of all that, congrats to author Charlie Huston on getting to do the thing where you have a little cameo in the film adaptation of your book.

Living the dream, baby.

Unfortunately, the film is otherwise made up of a veritable cornucopia of incongruent, not to mention somewhat suspect, pieces right from the start. Darren Aronofsky recently fully embraced GenAI with his horribly ugly Revolutionary War short series, deservedly earning his dumb-ass a ton of ill will, and dimming his star a bit. Zoey Kravitz still continues to carry the stink of her weird sexual attraction to at-the-time 14 year old Jaden Smith. Austin Butler seems like such a stereotypical narcissist little actor-boy that it’s almost like he’s doing it as a bit, so it's hard to take him seriously. And let‘s be honest, nobody looks more like they’re wearing an inauthentic costume than Matt Smith dressed up as a “tough” punk. And perhaps strangest of all, this film, seemingly a time-capsule from Miramax in the late 90s, is packed with people. Packed! Why? What was the draw? I don't get how projects like this happen. Which part of this movie was the heat that made it such a hot ticket? I don't get it.

But hey, at least Laura Dern shows for a very small cameo.

On the upside, the movie does feature a cat named Bud, who is played by the veteran cat actor by the name of Tonic, previously the star of the recent version of Pet Sematary. And while this may be a spoiler, just so everyone is aware, Tonic is just fine at the end of the movie. He's a good boy and perfectly safe. But... while there is no dramatized violence shown being done to him, it is mentioned that he was kicked at one point (not by the hero, but by a bad guy) in the story, and wears a little bandage, so there's that.

Just fyi.

So…

It’s 1998, and Henry “Hank” Thompson is an alcoholic, washed-up-never-was former baseball phenom who now works as a bartender on the Lower East Side. He is still haunted by the memories of the drunken car crash that he caused as a teen, the one that killed his best friend, and ended his major league aspirations. He calls his mother in Patterson, California, every day to discuss their deep love of the San Francisco Giants. He is casually dating a cute-as-a-button, tiny little EMT named Yvonne. Hank's neighbor is a visibly-aging British punk rocker named Russ Miner, who is returning to London to see his ailing father, so he asks Hank to take care of his cat, Bud. Hank agrees.

And that’s when the trouble starts.

The rest of the story involves a pair of quirky, but very dangerous, Russian mobsters, Aleksei and Pavel, and their Puerto Rican associate, Colorado, who viciously beat Hank, to the point that he needs emergency surgery to remove his ruptured kidney, while looking for Russ. A shady narcotics detective named Elise Roman, who questions Hank after the beating, is much more involved then it first appears. And a pair of notorious Hasidic assassins named the Drucker brothers, Lipa and Shmully, show up and kill with an almost superhuman abandon. All of these weirdos and degenerates and murderers are looking for a specific key that Russ supposedly has, which will lead them to where Russ has hidden a large amount of money.

Unfortunately, Hank accidentally found the key hidden in Bud’s litter box, but then he promptly lost it after getting blackout drunk at the bar.

And like a dumbass, he immediately confesses this to basically everyone.

This leads to a ridiculous and often very public cacophony of violence as multiple criminal interests converge, all while Hank struggles to figure out what’s going on, and never quite understanding just how much danger he’s in. Unfortunately, like I said, Hank is a dumbass, so by the time he manages, mostly through pure dumb luck, to worm his way out of this, he is a wanted man, believed to be responsible for the plethora of bodies this story leaves around the city, forcing him to run off and live under an assumed name on a beach in Mexico, with only a huge bag of money and a cat for company.

Much like the book's auther... Hank is living the dream.

For the most part, if you watch the trailer of this film, Caught Stealing is exactly what you would expect it to be. Especially if you've sat through films like 2 Days In The Valley, or 8 Heads In A Duffel Bag, or Lucky Number Slevin, or Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead, or Smokin' Aces, or The Big Hit, or... Boondock Saints (I'll pause here so we can all quickly puke in our own mouths). This film is just... more of that kind of shit, yet another in a long line of ugly bastard children of Tarantino. The only real notable difference is this one is an accident baby, the kid born late, separated by a decade and a half from the rest of its siblings. That's basically the film's main problem, it feels like something that should’ve been made twenty years ago.

That said, you know what?

As long as you have control of the litter box, a piece of fake cat poop in the litter box is a really clever place to put a Hide-A-Key.

Even worse? Even if this film didn't feel so weirdly out of date–all said with the caveat that I’m not someone who requires “likable” characters in order to enjoy a story–no one here is likable. The reason this particular case bothers me so much is because the reason they’re all so unlikable is not because they're “bad” people, it's because they're dull, badly drawn characters. No one here has a clever hook, or an interesting reason to be doing anything they do in this film. They're all just boring caricatures of boring old cliches. There's no pop, there's no innovation, there's not even a little bit of audacity. It all feels like Tarantino fanfic. It feels AI generated. Plus, there's just too many characters, all running around like chickens with their heads cut off in what is otherwise a really simple story, just one that is told in weirdly overly-complex way.

I just… didn’t like this movie.

Plus, I don’t know, maybe it was my general dislike of the whole production, but it’s also an ugly film. Not just the story, it looks god damn terrible too, almost like it was shot for a streaming show. It's just flat tv shit.

In the end, I just can't get over how out-of-date this thing felt.

With its "twisty" plot, its "quirky" criminals, its "rough" humor, and its "fun" violence (that it actually doesn't really show), with a cast packed with recognizable names like Austin Butler, Matt Smith, Zoe Kravitz, Liev Schreiber, Regina King, Vincent D’Onofrio, Carol Kane, Tenoch Huerta (AKA Namor), the previously mentioned Laura Dern, and even Bad Bunny, the man who recently scratched the majority of white America, causing a geyser of racism to come spraying out, my only real take away here is my shock at how far past its sell-by-date this film is.

But who knows.. maybe that’s just me. Which, to be fair, I guess it makes sense. I found myself being disappointed and bored with the book series by the end, so why wouldn’t that same feeling set in with the film version, only much sooner?

That said, if you ask me, this one isn’t worth your time.