Caught Stealing

That Elmore Leonard thing is hard. 

Caught Stealing is a serviceable entry in the crime genre. It’s got two, maybe three, really solid twists some interesting characters and once it starts moving it stays near the strike zone. 

It definitely strives for that Elmore Leonard intersection of cool characters, crime mayhem and comedy. 

I liked it but I didn’t love it though. First, the tone just shifts way too much. Is this a Hitchcockian thriller? You know, the wrong man caught up in a world of violence he doesn’t understand? 

Is it a caper film? Is it a comedy? Is it about a man atoning for his biggest sin? 

Unfortunately, it’s all of those things and a couple of more besides. 

There is a plot turn really early on that sucked all the energy out of the proceedings. Then a twist a few scenes later kind of brought everything back and gave Regina King a better role. 

BUT Spoiler: 

Zoe Kravitz character, our protagonist’s girlfriend gets killed. 

I don’t think the movie ever recovered from this and I think Aronofsky and screenwriter Charlie Huston should have done something else. Easy for me to say, I suppose. There are plenty of arguments to do it and it drives the movie forward and gives us a nice twist near the end. Also, there is something unique about Austin Butler’s Hank Thompson continually getting his friends killed throughout the proceedings. 

But the time and place for such a thing is in revenge movies. And instead of Butler’s phenom baseball player stalking the guys who killed his girl with a bat he spends most of the movie trying not to get shot. 

Again, killing the girl works in a different movie, maybe, but not the one where Matt Smith is playing a punk straight of central casting and complete with a Mohawk, a leather jacket and an inability to discharge an uzi properly. 

Her death and my belief that they should have just put her in a coma so she could come back at the end reminded me of two classic movie moments. 

The first is that Director Tony Scott overruled then screenwriter Quentin Tarantino who wanted Christian Slater’s Clarence Worley dead by the end of True Romance. 

Tarantino is a movie genius but Scott was absolutely right to let Clarence and his lover Alabama escape all that violence and ride off into the sunset together. 

The second thing was that in Stephen King’s Misery, evil Annie actually cuts poor Paul Sheldon’s feet clean off. In the movie she break’s his feet at the ankles. So at the end, when James Caan survives you see him walking with a cane. Broken perhaps but not completely changed. 

Screenwriter William Goldman argued that a book audience would be fine with poor Paul losing his feet and a movie audience would have never forgiven the filmmakers or the flick itself if the main character as permanently disfigured. 

I’m telling you, put Zoe in a coma and have her come back in the last reel on the beach with our hero and you got movie magic. Instead, you got, a noir story perhaps, a movie about a guy losing everything. 

Except it’s just not quite that either. This movie is a single, maybe a double but it’s nowhere close to a home run. 

Anyway, Regina King is great, and I liked seeing Leiv Schrieber and Vincent D’Onofrio even if they don’t get enough screen time. 

It’s a wonderful to see Griffin Dunne and Carol Kane even if they only get one scene a piece. 

Everyone is cooking but the meal never quite satisfies. It’s happens that way something’s. Elmore Leonard wrote 45 novels but in the end Hollywood only made three perfect movies from his life’s work. 

This is no Get Shorty. But it’s a damn sight better than Be Cool.