Caught Stealing

Caught Stealing is a brutal, serviceable neo-noir.  Set in 1998, the movie is about a handsome and appealing kid who becomes entangled in a clash between different groups of mobsters vying for a 4 million dollar pay day, ill-gotten funds that are locked away in a storage compartment.  I don't recall the source of the money -- it's immaterial to the movie in any event.  Several picturesque and psychopathic members of the Russian mafia are looking for the cash; they are allied with a crooked lady cop.  Two Hasidic mobsters also appear, criminals so vicious that the other crooks fear them -- they have a propensity for gouging out people's eyes.  The action is more-or-less non-stop with the naive hero rocketing about NYC like a silver ball in a pinball game. The protagonist is named Hank and he's a cheerful alcoholic bartender in a dive in the Alphabet City neighborhood of Manhattan.  Hank was scouted by big league baseball in his High School year, but crashed his car in a drunk driving incident, killing his best friend in the accident and, further, destroying his knee and, thereby, ending his career in the major leagues before it even begins.  (We see the crash every twenty minutes in a spectacular flashback.)  Hank's next door neighbor at his apartment, a punk with a huge rainbow colored Mohawk, returns to England because his father is dying -- Russ, the Mohawk-punk, asks Hank to care for his cat.  No sooner is Russ out the door, the Russian mafia descend on the scene, savaging poor Hank, who is just collateral damage, to the extent that one of his kidney's is kicked to pieces in the assault.  Hank wakes up sans one of his kidneysin the hospital.  His girlfriend, played by Zoe Kravitz, warns him that he can't drink any more and that he had better get rid of his stores of booze (he has bottles stashed everywhere).  The bad guys are indignant about the fact that Russ has absconded the scene (they think) to enjoy his four million dollars in stolen drug money in Tulum, Mexico.  They think they can torture Hank into telling them where Russ is hiding.  Poor Hank gets persecuted and harassed some more.  There is additional collateral damage and Hank has to go on the lam himself.  Then, the really nasty mobsters intervene, Lip and Schmully, the Hasid "scary monsters" complete with hand grenades, machine guns, huge patriarchal beards and curled forelocks.  (Lip and Schmully are amiable enough when they're not busting heads and they are good sons to their mother, Bubbe played by Carol Kane.  A lot more people get killed.  Hank, who seems a rather dim bulb, figures out a way to get the "scary monsters" to kill off the other bad guys in competition for the four million.  The film's carnage ends happily enough.  Hank gets away-- we see him kicking-back on the beach at Tulum.  Furthermore, he finds a way to send his mother, played by Laura Dern for one 30 second shot, a couple million bucks.  Mothers and sons are a sort of theme in the movie:  Lip and Schmully are extravagantly faithful and loving with respect to Bubbe; Hank is always calling his mother to discuss baseball with her and their beloved team, the San Francisco Giants.   

Caught Stealing plays like an amiable, if violent, mash-up between the Coen Brothers and a crime picture by a hard-boiled neo-noir director like the British Ben Wheatley or the Safdie Brothers.  In fact, the film is directed by Darren Aronofsky.  The movie is well-made with plenty of clever twists and turns and it chugs along efficiently -- it has a break-neck pace and the poor hero has lost his kidney (and his girlfriend, killed execution-style) in the first half hour.  The body count is implausibly high. A certain taste for the sordid and grim-looking locations near Coney Island mark the film as the work of Aronofsky who seems to be slumming here. The picture is made with plenty of  flash and pizzazz.  The action is all heightened, amped up to the edge of surrealism and there's lots of taut, bitter dialogue.  Griffin Dunne appears in long-shot -- I didn't recognize him until the credits identified the part and there's lots of well-known talent in the picture.  There's nothing new in this tour of murder and mayhem, but the picture is entertaining, even companionable for its two-hour running length.  I was sent on a mission to meet a girl in Alphabet City on the lower East Side and, so, some of the movie looked vaguely familiar to me -- the dingy sidewalks and decomposing store-front bars, the alleys clogged with garbage, the drug dealers transacting business on street corners and on the stoops of grim cast-iron buildings the color of congealed smoke. The movie's sufficiently atmospheric and pungent that you can almost smell it.  But my adventure was in1982 and the movie (released in 2025) is set in 1998 -- I guess these areas have long been gentrified.