My End of 2025 Catchups will still be ongoing well into the New Year, which is perfectly fine for me, as January looks to be the usual crop of mid-range horror movies and previous year stragglers. Today is what I like to call the Austin Butler Downer Double Feature, as both films are movies that had me feeling rather sad despite Austin Butler being on hand to try and liven things up. I suppose it’s a shortcoming of mine as a critic that depressing movies have to work much harder to convince me of their quality than goofy ones, and being presented with two films by notoriously grim directors was definitely a challenge. Can either of these depressing films by depressing filmmakers manage to get a thumbs up from yours truly? Let’s find out!!
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Caught Stealing
Caught Stealing is owned by Sony Pictures Releasing
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Hank Thompson (Austin Butler) isn’t someone you’d look at twice if you passed him on the street. He’s a bartender in New York City, he has a crappy apartment in the Lower East Side, and his good looks and charming personality do just enough to cover for his obvious alcoholism. When his neighbor (Matt Smith) asks him to watch his cat one weekend, it seems like just another meaningless event in his meaningless life, but then gangsters start chasing after him, the cops get involved, and the few friends he has left in this world start getting mixed up in whatever mystery he finds himself at the center of. With few people to turn to and fewer clues as to what’s even going on, can Hank outrun this waking nightmare as faster than he did from his own dark past, or has the universe decided that now’s the time to pay the piper for all the ways he managed to screw up his life?
I probably should have known better than to expect a fun movie out of the most depressing filmmakers of our generation, but the trailers suckered me in with a silly premise and goofy characters in what looked like a lost Guy Ritchie joint, so I took the gamble on him lightening up for once. Sure enough, the finished product is undeniably an Aronofsky movie which means a lot of sad things happen, and frankly it was a real struggle to get through. What’s at least interesting about this movie, though also why it doesn’t work as well as some of his better films, is that he does seem to be trying to break outside his comfort zone with larger than life characters and the farcical plotting, but he’s simply ill-equipped for this kind of material and fails to merge it with his usual sensibilities. Someone like the aforementioned Guy Ritchie, or even Vince Gilligan, could have juggled the disparate parts of this story and wrangled them into something coherent, but they both have backgrounds in comedy which Aronofsky clearly does not. We flip wildly between tragedy and humor in a way that fails to take full advantage of either, with the darker elements feeling gratuitous and the lighter moments robbing our characters of any consistency or depth. Austin Butler, for all the charm and charisma he brings to this, can’t find a consistent emotional wavelength to explore because the script has him running from one plot point to another at breakneck speed. He’s given one scene to express his sadness over a bad thing happening before he’s back to spinning lies, crafting schemes, or cracking jokes, and while he’s good at all of those things, having him rush through it in such quick succession leaves him feeling rudderless and without much of an arc to go through. The script is based on a book which is always a double-edged sword for filmmakers, and I’m guessing the pacing between scenes worked much better on the page than trying to cram it all on screen, but even taking that into consideration, I still think the blame falls squarely on Aronofsky’s shoulders. I give the man credit for at least attempting to tell a few jokes and I think the narrative did cater to his sensibilities as a filmmaker, but he’s gonna need a little more practice before he can successfully make us laugh at a clown and then jab him in the throat to watch as the blood slowly pools around the floor.
The Reviewers Unite 