The Hustle (Review)
The Only Con The Hustle Pulls Off is Swindling Audiences Out of their Money.
Let me start by addressing the biggest question when it comes to The Hustle, which is if it manages to live up to the 80s comedy classic, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The short answer is, no. Unfortunately, that same answer applies to whether The Hustle is a good movie and whether you should go and see it in theaters. The film is a knock-off that borders on insulting not just to the source material but to the audience as well. Gender-bending has never looked so bad on the big screen.
When it comes to big screen con artists, two of the best of all time were played by Steve Martin and Michael Caine in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The Hustle tries desperately to recreate the comedic magic of that film by pulling a gender swap on the two characters, replacing them with Rebel Wilson and Anne Hathaway. On paper, it seems like it could work. In fact, it seems like it could even be brilliant. Updating a tale of two rival con artists to the 21st century and adding a female perspective? I’m sold! However, instead of adding anything new, The Hustle simply cherry picks its favorite moments from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and shoehorns them into the film in the most unwieldy ways imaginable. The problem is that even though it seems like The Hustle has all the jokes it needs in the source material, it’s clear that they’re being told by people who have a terrible sense of humor.
To be quite honest, The Hustle is actually painful to watch. Sure there were other people in the theater who laughed during certain moments in the film. But I can only assume that they were laughing at the film, not along with it. This is an important distinction to make because you laugh with someone when they make a good joke. You laugh at them when they’re a bumbling idiot. That’s exactly what The Hustle is though because it’s a film that only reaches for low hanging fruit. The talent is there to make an exceptional film. After all, Wilson has been known to be pretty funny in the past, and Hathaway has some experience playing the “the straight man” in comedies in the past (see Get Smart). Here though they’re given weak characters to work with and a script that couldn’t be bothered to think for itself. The end result is nothing short of disastrous.
The Hustle suffers from the age-old problem of a bunch of guys telling a story about women. Not only does this film suffer from having too many cooks in the kitchen when it comes to the script (with four writers attached to it), but they’re all men. Now, I think there are male writers out there capable of doing female characters justice, but The Hustle resorts to using cliches as character traits when it comes to the two women in the film. Wilson’s character is a poor attempt at third wave feminism in her sexual liberation, but it only makes her seem incapable of being taken seriously. Almost every joke that comes out of her mouth is about sex, which is fine when it comes to a side character (think Stiffler in the American Pie series) but enjoying sex is not the foundation of a personality. The same can be said for Hathaway’s character, who is just as poorly developed as Wilson’s. The film should have taken a note from Wilson’s recent Isn’t It Romantic and made sure to include women when it came to writing the script.
Even taking a moment to completely forget that The Hustle is a remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrals, there’s still nothing remarkable about the film. It feels like the byproduct of the Hollywood machine so desperate to fill Friday release dates that at a certain point it doesn’t care enough about the quality to sacrifice the quantity. It’s a movie that is so bad that I was actually frowning the entire time. However, even as painful as it was to watch two talented actresses embarrass themselves on the screen (I mentioned the difference between laughing with and laughing at earlier), The Hustle is not a film that is even deserving of my resentment. In a month or two I’ll forget it ever happened (though I’m sure I’ll revisit it when I consider the 10 worst movies of 2019 at the end of the year) The only saving grace it offers is that it’s not the worst movie that Anne Hathaway has starred in this year, though it is a very close second.
Quite simply, The Hustle is a complete waste of time. Anything it tries to do was done better in the source material. It’s a paint by numbers remake that doesn’t add anything to the film or the premise by updating it. In fact, it feels like The Hustle is almost detrimental when it comes to making the case for remakes featuring gender-swapping. I’ve always been interested in seeing what perspectives from a different gender might bring to classic films, but The Hustle doesn’t offer a new perspective. Instead, it hashes out the same jokes and the same exact premise, and seemingly only changes the names and genders in the script. The truth is that The Hustle clearly had the talent where it should have been so much more instead of a lazy, bordering on insulting, remake.
