Austin Butler in a criminal schlep through downtown NYC

There is a nasty habit in Hollywood, and among movie critics, of allowing filmmakers to incessantly upchuck the same lame crime retreads.

They are blinded by cartoony underworld figures, seedy alleys, drugs and guns as they blithely overlook the lazy writing, painfully obvious plots, gratuitous violence and chase scenes as enlivening as a Metro North commute.

All of these bruising exercises are nearly identical, except lately they’ve become both blander and more unpleasant than ever.

That’s especially true of “Caught Stealing,” an aimless schlep with delusions of grandeur starring “Elvis” actor Austin Butler as a Lower East Side bartender named Hank who becomes an unwitting pawn in a narcotics dealing scheme.

Unfortunately, the talented Darren Aronofsky of “Black Swan” and “The Whale” was caught directing it.

He’s best known for psychological thrills set against arrestingly grimy visuals. Aronofsky’s brain goes on summer break here. There’s absolutely nothing intriguing bubbling beneath the surface of this mystifyingly un-fun movie that mostly takes place below 14th Street.

The yawn of a story is that some silly thugs covet an unremarkable object. Tale as old as crime. A group of gangsters and a corrupt police officer are on the hunt for Hank’s friend Russ’ hidden key to a cash-filled storage unit. That’s all, folks.

The closest “Caught Stealing” comes to creating a character to care about is Hank, an alcoholic whose dream of playing baseball for the Giants was ended by a fatal, drunken car accident.

Every day he phones his California mom, during calls that feel fake, to chit chat about their favorite team.

At night, Hank relives the crash in his nightmares. Wherever he goes, he stares longingly at bottles of booze. He is forced to stop drinking after he loses a kidney in a fight, and then he goes on a bender and strips. 

It’s the stuff of eye rolls. Hank’s trauma and addiction are cliched and underexplored, and he is simply not enticing enough to carry an entire movie.

Butler does brooding well. We already knew that. He breathily simmered to great effect all through “Elvis” and “Dune: Part Two.” And he brings his natural leading-man gravitas to this. But Hank is an empty shell of diminishing interest.

Hank’s girlfriend, Yvonne, played by Zoë Kravitz? Couldn’t tell you much about her except she always seems jetlagged and is in less of the film than you’d expect.

Russ, meanwhile, is a British punk with a mohawk, who’s given a performance by “The Crown”’s Matt Smith that suggests he maybe once saw a photo of a mohawk.

“Caught Stealing,” based on author Charlie Huston’s book I shan’t be reading, is set in 1998, so the east side thugs are Russians, Hasidic Jews and Bad Bunny.  

It’s with these slightly wacky baddies orbiting Hank that Aronofsky thinks he’s directing a comedy — or his skewed idea of one. 

Shmully (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Lipa (Liev Schreiber) serve Hank matzo ball soup and make him drive the getaway car because it’s Shabbat.

The dirty cop, Detective Roman (Regina King), delivers a speech about the glory of black-and-white cookies.

None of this is remotely funny.

There’s a bunch of “Scooby Doo” closeups on a cat that, warning to the squeamish, gets abused by the Russians. Perhaps breaking a kitty’s leg gets laughs in Siberia?

In the end, what “Caught Stealing” has stolen is time and talent.

The only guy out there routinely doing a good job with this genre is Guy Ritchie. His output is impeccably cast, hilarious and has badass, thrillingly brutal action sequences. Unlike the predictable “Caught Stealing,” there are unexpected twists.

Aronofsky, whose work I’ve always liked, should retreat back to the dark recesses of the psyche and leave the comically dark underbelly of organized crime to the pros.