Tag Archives: Austin Butler

Movie Review: Caught Stealing

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In terms of horrible New York City apartments, squalor, and barely surviving, set in a gritty, dark, and depressing story, the new movie “Caught Stealing” is one of the all-time standards.

Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as Hank Thompson and Zoë Kravitz as his girlfriend, Yvonne, who are constantly in trouble, running for their lives, and getting beaten up. One of the early beatings of Hank involves a long period of kicking his midsection while he is lying on the ground. This causes Hank to lose one of his kidneys. At some point during a scene like this, you would think that director Darren Aronofsky would have yelled ‘cut’ long before this scene became obvious overkill.

Unfortunately, this movie is mostly about scenes like this, with one of the few good aspects, the appearance of an extremely attractive house cat, who is present for almost the entire movie, despite the constant gunfire and violence. My guess is the director thought of having this cat appear in this movie to diffuse the over-the-top action scenes.

The story is about a large sum of money that two groups of criminals are trying to find at all costs. Hank has a friend who is leaving for England, and the criminals think that Hank knows where the money is. What follows are chase scenes and non-stop gunfire.

One group of criminals is a Russian gang, the other group of two Hasidic Jewish men, played by two well-known actors, Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio, are the most violent, at one point blowing up a nightclub with many people still inside. Regina King plays a police detective in a role and a story twist that we have all seen too many times before.

While the acting is good in this film, the story, over top violence and several parts of the conclusion that do not hold water, I do not recommend this movie, despite the too high 84% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Movie Review: The Bikeriders

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The new movie “The Bikeriders” will surprise many fans who will expect a standard movie drama about men in the late 1960’s and 70s who chose a life of crime, riding bikes, drinking, and drugs, during the era of the Vietnam War. Instead, this movie tries to tell the story like it’s an interview/documentary with the main interviewee, Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, talking to a reporter about her life as the wife of a motorcycle gang member, Benny, played by Austin Butler. This entire story is told from Benny’s perspective and his life of meeting and then marrying his wife.

The problem with this unusual method of screenwriting telling is that the story becomes less chronological and more a series of vignettes, that can get old rather quickly. The idea of this kind of life is always the same, “when you live a life of violence, your time is always coming”. What goes around comes around with people like this, who spend their entire lives looking over their shoulder, or getting arrested by the police.

This movie stars a number of well-known famous actors, including Norman Reedus, Michael Shannon,
Tom Hardy and Damon Herriman. The acting is overall very good, with a story that meanders to different times with some flashbacks and at times moves too slowly. Unfortunately, other than telling the story like an interview/documentary there is nothing new here, nothing that all moviegoers have seen before.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are an average 82% with my rating 70% and a very marginal recommendation, only for some of the acting.

Movie Review: Dune Part 2

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The sequel to the original Dune released in 2021 was a movie I streamed some time ago and it was so boring that I had to fast-forward through a majority of the film. For the sequel “Dune Part 2”, the extreme levels of boredom still exist and I thought that the best way to see both of these movies is to either get the DVDs or stream them, and then just skip to the action scenes and special effects. Dune 2 is yet another example of special effects first, great screenplay a distant second. This is mostly because of the anticipated embedded audience that the producers expect because of the fans of the Dune books and the original movie.

The other problem with this film is that nothing is really explained almost as if they expect that the entire movie-going audience has fully read the entire book series. Characters come out of nowhere, and there are few if any connections from one scene to the next. For a 2 hour and 46 minute film, this can get old very quickly and I was anxiously waiting for this entire long nightmare to end after about 30 minutes.

As for the high ratings both on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, I have no idea why this long, boring, and disconnected story is receiving such high marks. 190 million dollars was spent on this production, and most of this went to the special effects, which for me the is only reason to try and endure the 2+ hours. There is no real understandable or even recognizable story here, and with a better screenplay, this would have been a much better movie experience.

Dune 2 has several of the same actors as the first film, including Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and Josh Brolin with this sequel including new actors, Austin Butler, Javier Bardem, Dave Bautista, Florence Pugh, and Christopher Walken. After some research there is a Dune 3 in the planning stages and depending on how much money this mostly bad movie makes there might very well be a 3rd movie. Based on how boring the first two Dune films have been, I will find it difficult to sit through a 3rd one.

Regardless of the incorrect high ratings for Dune Part 2, I do not recommend this movie.