Trapped Movie Review

TRAPPED

Hank Thompson was a prodigious baseball player in high school, but now he can’t play. Other than that, everything’s great. He’s dating a great girl, he’s a nighttime bartender at a seedy New York City bar, and his favorite team, predicted to be the underdog, is making an improbable comeback for the title. When his punk neighbor Russ asks him to look after his cat for a few days, Hank has no idea he’ll find himself caught in the middle of a motley crew of deadly gangsters. They’re all after Hank, and he doesn’t even know why. As he tries to escape their clutches, Hank must summon all his energy and stay alive long enough to figure it out.

Film Review

Darren Aronofsky has often been criticized for his inability to contain himself, to channel his cinema. Almost in response to these criticisms, his penultimate film, The Whale , featured a morbidly obese man whose body the camera struggled to capture in full view. Nothing of the sort in Caught Stealing : an entertainment that doesn’t reinvent the genre, but doesn’t hamper it either. The director abandons heavy biblical or literary references and departs from his tendency to follow obsessed or dependent characters. So much so that when the credits reveal the name “Darren Aronofsky,” one is left slightly surprised.Classic cinema experiences.

Austin Butler and Leather

Since bursting onto the Hollywood scene with his portrayal in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley biopic, the actor has maintained an unbreakable connection with this material. Whether it’s the King’s jacket, the biker jacket in Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders , or here, the very punk jacket he borrows from his friend Russ, these clothes shape the image of his personality and his roles. Smooth-faced and pleasing to the eye, the Californian has often played rough and tough characters. His role as Hank Thompson in The Trap doesn’t share the same intensity as other leading roles in Darren Aronofsky’s filmography, but he remains the lifeblood of the film.

Caught stealing

Manhattan bartender, baseball hopeful before an accident cut short his career, die-hard Giants fan, and alcoholic Hank joins his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) after work. The two become embroiled in a dark tale of drugs, money, and cats when Hank’s neighbor Russ is forced to travel to London to return to his gravely ill father’s bedside. The two are brought together by force of circumstance in a plot that crosses paths between the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple , Martin Scorsese’s After Hours , and Guy Ritchie’s Snatch .

Plowing the furrow of black comedy and high-intensity thriller allows Aronofsky to torture his character in a different way than in his previous films. The sentence that would make the most devout priest tremble with fear doesn’t have time to fall since each incident is immediately followed by a new situation of crisis or distress. Here, the filmmaker seems less invested in the story and explores the psyche of his characters with his allegories (or visions altering their states of consciousness) to scrutinize more the faces, in particular that of Austin Butler, in almost every shot. He takes a malicious pleasure in isolating him under his lens, to detect if the leather of his face is going to crack, if the figure of the friendly neighbor of the neighborhood is going to implode and reveal a monster of violence.

Trapped

Ultimately, this lighter atmosphere, more inclined towards black comedy than drama, contrasts with the rest of Aronofsky’s filmography while offering him a new way to express his neuroses. The real tragedy, however, lies in the impossibility of taking the time to mourn his dead. Hank remains constantly on the alert, haunted by the ghosts of a past he would like to erase and harassed by implacable enemies. Less emphatic than Requiem for a Dream or Black Swan , Trapped energetically assumes its scripting facilities and unabashedly asserts its status as entertainment rather than a pretentious manifesto. By symbolically returning to 1998, the year of his first feature film Pi , Aronofsky offers himself a makeover and reveals a taste for fun that we did not know he had.