In ‘Caught Stealing,’ Hank Gets Caught Borrowing

There are crime thrillers, and then there are cat thrillers. Caught Stealing (pronounced “Cat Stealing”), the latest adaptation of Charlie Huston’s cult pulp novel, pretends to be the former while very obviously being the latter. Ostensibly about Hank Thompson — a washed-up ex-baseball prospect turned bartender who gets caught up in a Manhattan underworld bloodbath once he agrees to look after his neighbor’s cat — the film quickly reveals its true star and chaotic gravitational center: Bud the cat.

Bud (played with panache by Tonic) is a menace. A blue-eyed orange tabby with the manners of a raccoon (“he’s a biter”) and the morals of a film noir femme fatale, he slips from one bloody scene to the next with the uncanny timing of a four-legged harbinger. Wherever Bud goes, death follows. Allegiances shift. Kidneys rupture. He’s like a feline Forrest Gump if Gump had a taste for mayhem and an unbreakable lease in a walk-up on the Lower East Side.

Caught Stealing ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Darren Aronofsky
Written by: Darren Aronofsky and Charlie Huston
Starring: Austin Butler, Zoë Kravitz, Liev Schrieber, Bad Bunny, Regina King
Running time:  107 mins

Hank, played here with blue eyes, impeccable abs and small-town charisma by Austin Butler, mostly stumbles through the film like a man who desperately wants a nap but instead keeps waking up in the ER or someone else’s crime scene. The plot — keys, cops, EMTs with hearts of gold (Zoë Kravitz), Russian mobsters, Colorado a Latino with a pistola (Bad Bunny), Hasidic gangsters (Liev Schrieber) — pretends to matter. But the camera’s eye, and the film’s soul, belong to Bud.

Not least because it features Russ, the mohicaned Cockney (Matt Smith), Caught Stealing feels a lot like New York’s answer to Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The violence is frequent, abrupt, painful enough to make you wince and just cartoonish enough to make you feel weird about laughing. And yet, you will laugh. At Hank’s mounting injuries. At the crazy calm Hasidim. At the increasingly convoluted schemes to retrieve this cat. At the fact that half the movie’s body count can be directly traced to Bud curling up in the wrong lap at the wrong time.

As if making a contemporary GOP documentary, director Darren Aronofsky shoots 1990s New York like a blood-stained cat playground, lingering on claustrophobic apartments, gaudy clubs, subterranean bars, and alleys littered with garbage, fish bones and felony warrants. It’s a gritty vision, underlined by Bud’s haunting presence behind each set.

In the end, Caught Stealing never answers the big questions. Is Bud the Devil? A CIA asset? The reincarnated soul of someone Hank wronged in a Little League game? The movie doesn’t care, and neither should you. It knows exactly what it is: a high-velocity, low-stakes noir comedy that weaponizes feline indifference with lethal precision.

And Bud? Bud doesn’t care about your questions, your plotlines, or your moral compass. He’s already slinking into the next frame, where someone else is about to die mysteriously while he naps on a pile of cash.