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In Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, a washed-up wrestling fighter, played by Mickey Rourke, struggling to gain relevance, throws all his woes to one particular decade. “The 90s sucked”, he says almost triumphantly. Aranofsky shoots this moment with such decidedness that it’s like he agrees with the statement, like Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson is channelling the director’s thoughts. So it is a surprise that the same director makes Caught Stealing, a film set in the 90s, using a very 90s stylistic motif – that of the cool, stylised caper, the movie that tried to copy Pulp Fiction. Think Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, or Go, that spearheaded a series of mostly forgettable films. Things to do in Denver when you’re dead? Smokin’ Aces? Oooof, the 90s sucked.

I became a person in the 90s. My loss of innocence into the sad teens came exactly as everything changed in 2001, but before I embraced that strange decade of both strange peaceful excess and angry ennui: the time that gave us both Nirvana and Backstreet Boys.

Caught Stealing follows a quintessentially ’90s reluctant hero who lives the most bohemian life in New York City before Giuliani’s gentrification kicked in. Hank (Austin Butler) is a Californian whose promising baseball career was cut short after an accident, and he is now a dashing and charming bartender in a dive bar. Between his job and his girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), Hank’s neighbour, Russ (Matt Smith), a mohawk-wearing anti-system British punk rocker, asks him to look after his cat as he needs to visit his dying father in England. Almost instantly, Hank and Yvonne become involved in a contrived and life-threatening plot with a Puerto Rican drug dealer, Colorado (Bad Bunny), and his two Russian henchmen, a police Detective (Regina King), and two thugs from the Hasidic Jew mafia (Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber). All are looking for the amount of money Russ left with Hank.

What’s interesting is how close to that old school style of movies this is, and how it constantly reminds us of how much the world has changed since 1998. The first shot is the skyline of New York with particular focus on the World Trade Centre. The music playing in the background varies from Garbage (the band, not the sound) to new originals the British band Idles made with a distinct flavour of British post-hardcore (think McLusky, a band Russ would definitely listen to in the absence of valid new options in the punk scene).

I loved the details around objects from that era, highlighting how this would be the last time we would see these – like using a car lighter to escape, or the screen of an old Motorola mobile phone. The spectrum of change is around the corner, but never really creeps in – sometimes someone will reference the tragedy of gentrification or Giuliani’s much-maligned policies that cleaned the city of its charm and personality. James Murphy would sing 2007, “New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down, our records all show you were filthy but fine”, and Caught Stealing shows a little of the filth that was lost.

But these moments are too few and fleeting, and either feel like an afterthought or the kernel for an idea everyone just forgot about. I couldn’t see if the film was nostalgic about that time or glad for the change. It feels performative, like a museum that tries to recreate an epoch in a diorama.

The result is a fun but forgettable piece of cinema. Austin Butler isn’t given much to play with, apart from one fun moment near the end, but Matt Smith is having fun as a man who’s so detached he’s not even part of that decade. Schreiber and D’Onofrio are interesting, but their characters are too similar to that first scene in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch. It was nice to see Griffin Dunne, who is perfect for the part of a symbol of New York’s heyday that is on its way to being forgotten.

But as a whole, Caught Stealing doesn’t go beyond the cool stylistic touch of the genre it’s inspired by. And, like those films, it works only because it doesn’t dare to go deep into its roots. It’s not really surface-level; it’s knee-deep and barely more. It’s all encapsulated by the strangest song choice at the end – when all is said and resolved, a little epilogue wraps the story in a very characteristically happy bow, to the tune of The Magnetic Field’s Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side, a song about an ugly man who woos the most sought after girl in school because he has a car. And while you can say that this song is a precursor to the happy twee indie optimism of the early 00s, it comes across as if it’s because it’s a song from 1999 that talks about cars. After all, you know, Hank was in a car accident.

Verdict: 3 out of 5
For the ’90s teen who still reminisces about Trainspotting and Guy Ritchie movies. For better or for worse, the reconstruction here is perfect.

Ticket giveaway – Went Up The Hill

LSJ Online and Vendetta Films have five double passes to give away to Went Up The Hill, a new Australian-New Zealand co-production starring Vicky Krieps and Dacre Montgomery, opening in selected cinemas in Sydney and Melbourne on 11 September.

Abandoned as a child, Jack travels to remote New Zealand to attend the funeral of his estranged mother Elizabeth. There he meets her widow, Jill, who has questions of her own. Over the nights that follow, Elizabeth returns and possesses Jack and Jill, using each of their bodies to speak to the other. Jill faces Elizabeth’s suicide, while Jack confronts his abandonment. As they learn she is trapped in limbo, Jack begins to doubt Elizabeth’s reason for returning. Caught in a life-threatening nocturnal dance, Jack and Jill must find a way to let go of Elizabeth’s hold before she pushes them to the edge.

For a chance to win one of the double passes, email your address to journal@lawsociety.com.au with the subject line WENT UP THE HILL before Wednesday 3 September.