Our review of Caught Stealing: Darren Aronofsky mistreats Austin Butler

In 1998, the Twin Towers still dominate the Manhattan skyline . Rudolf Giuliani has just been re-elected mayor of New York. The Big Apple is already gentrifying, but it's not yet the chic, polished city of the 2020s. There are phone booths and bums on the sidewalks. The Lower East Side is home to a bizarre fauna. You can have a website designer and an English punk (Matt Smith, with a mohawk) as your next-door neighbor. This is the case for Hank ( Austin Butler, Baz Lhurman's Elvis ), a former future baseball star and San Francisco Giants fan, deprived of a professional career following a car accident he caused himself—he still has nightmares about it at night. Hank ekes out a living as a nighttime bartender in a seedy bar run by a ponytailed, cocaine-addled old man (Griffin Dune, the actor from Scorsese 's After Hours , to whom Trapped would like to pay homage). He calls his mom every day. He has a sexy, devoted girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz, sacrificed a third of the way through). This routine is derailed when his punk neighbor, Russ, gives him his cat while he's away.

Two shaved-headed Russian thugs start by beating up Hank and sending him to the hospital. A Puerto Rican nightclub owner threatens him in turn. Two heavily armed rabbis are also on his trail—Liev Schreiber and Vincent d'Onofrio, amusing as bearded, violent pious men. A corrupt investigator (Regina King) complicates the case. The key to the plot is a key that leads to a stash. It's hidden in a plastic turd in the cat's litter box. This is the pretext for a wild chase through the seedy streets of New York, from Chinatown to Brighton Beach.

Skip the ad

Through this adaptation of a Charlie Huston novel, Darren Aronofsky takes a nostalgic look at NYC, an urban jungle populated by strange zebras. The Brooklyn native remembers the city of his younger years. It's touching but not enough to get a limp-kneed roller coaster off the ground, a roller coaster without any real momentum or acceleration, despite the heavy guitars of the Bristol punk rock band Idles. Aronofsky films with the handbrake on. The dialogue doesn't spark. The gunshots sound like damp squibs. Trapped never gets going and ends up looking like a pale Tarantino copy.

Darren Aronofsky doesn't really help his case as an unclassifiable and often disappointing filmmaker. Drug trip ( Requiem for a Dream , based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr), sci-fi melodrama ( The Fountain ), psychoanalytic thriller ( Black Swan , Mother! ), wrestling film ( The Westler , with Mickey Rourke back), biblical blockbuster ( Noah ), or tear-jerker drama ( The Whale , with an overweight Brendan Fraser ), we're hardly any further ahead on what drives the American filmmaker, honored with a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française last April.