The Current Cinema - CAUGHT STEALING, (Darren Aronofsky, USA, 2025)

Hank (Austin Butler) being subtle, Caught Stealing

Darren Aronofsky has a reputation for attacking his subjects full on... I dont think he does subtlety much at all. For Caught Stealing he wanted "to go back to the basics, and let's make great entertainment" at least that's what he told Karl Quinn for a piece in the SMH yesterday. Paywalled so no link...

Nikita Kukushkin, Benito Martínez Ocasio, Yuri Kolokolnikov,
... bad guys in Caught Stealing

To set up the story, you have to be up for the sight of two bald Russian (or maybe Ukrainian, it's complicated) mobsters, (one nicknamed Microbe who sports either an abstract facial tattoo or eczema over the right side of his face) kicking the living bejesus out of our hero, alcoholic barman and ex-baseball big leaguer Hank (Austin Butler), to pretty much start proceedings off. That does happen after a warmup sex scene. After that, if violent sudden death is your bag then Caught Stealing  is entertainment. The early kicking is so severe, and seen so on screen, that Hank ends up in hospital minus a kidney. Later, to pry information out of him, one of the Russians/Ukrainians uses a pair of pliers to start removing the stitches that patched up the missing kidney. 

Liev Schreiber, Austin Butler, Vincent D'Onofrio

The entertainment includes a corrupt black female cop and two Jewish gangsters who (Spoiler Alert) dont mind killing people on the Sabbath but whose religion prevents them from driving a car on that day, hence they have to press Hank into service for that job, notwithstanding that Hank has had an aversion to driving ever since he killed his father (?) while driving drunk to spring training. The father's lack of a seatbelt sets up a later scene with another violent car death. 

It is a Darren Aronofsky movie and it is thus, as usual, 'excessive'. I'm not sure I'd adjudge it as entertainment or a 'fun film'. Karl Quinn speculated on possible sequels given that Hank is the hero of a series of three novels so far by author/scriptwriter Charlie Huston.  I'd be surprised.... but then again Donald Westlake's Parker, first iterated by Lee Marvin in Point Blank and similarly back then accused of excessive violence, was eventually also played by Michel Constantin, Anna Karina, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Peter Coyote, Mel Gibson, Jason Statham and Marc Wahlberg over forty years or so.