“The Hustle” is a rivals-in-crime feminista scam comedy set on the French Riviera, with Anne Hathaway as a drop-dead-elegant British seductress-grifter who fleeces wealthy suckers the way they deserve to be fleeced, and Rebel Wilson as a disheveled vulgarian who’s just as shrewd an operator (she works the same trickery on a more low-rent breed of men). The movie is a remake of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (1988), which was a remake of “Bedtime Story” (1964). And this trio of light-fingered films, each made decades apart, adds up to a peculiar footnote in the history of Hollywood con-artist deviltry. Each film comes with a movie-star pairing that sounds, on paper, like wild-meets-debonair perfection: Marlon Brando and David Niven in “Bedtime Story,” Steve Martin and Michael Caine in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” and now Wilson and Hathaway in “The Hustle.” Each film is a stylized confection of drawing-room class tension, airy sight gags, and underworld games staged with clockwork precision. Yet it’s a funny thing: As entertainments, all three versions, including this latest one, are merely okay. You can’t put your finger on anything that goes terribly wrong, yet the effect, in each case, is more innocuously diverting than exhilarating. Maybe that’s because the genre is crime but the tone is farce. “The Hustle” starts off as the liveliest of the three, and it has its share of winning scenes. Hathaway and Wilson, who spend most of the movie trying to outfox each other, inject their roles with outsize personality. Yet “The Hustle,” fun as some of it is, is a tall fizzy drink in which the fizz never completely rises to the top of the glass. Hathaway, acting with a ruthlessness as crisp and perky as her British enunciation, comes on like Julie Andrews playing a Bond villain. In “The Hustle,” though, she’s also an ace chameleon who impersonates, at various points, a dishy dim-bulb American lottery winner, a tearful royal who has lost everything, a Cockney scamp, and a German physician as severe as a dominatrix. Playing this honey-trap manipulator who men can’t resist, Hathaway clearly relishes the opportunity to strut her misanthropic stuff, and she’s very good at it. She maneuvers each scene with icy comic control, whereas Rebel Wilson, with her discombobulated hostility, plays Penny as a desperado in a china shop. Wilson, making the most of a script that has some tart lines (she calls a rasping European on an airplane “Nazi Gollum”), has a rare gift for making everything she says sound spontaneous, as if she were constantly adjusting herself to the surroundings that make her feel out of whack. “Take this to the guest room, butlery person,” she blurts out to the person she thinks is the butler (and, in fact, is). “The Hustle” opens with Penny (Wilson), dressed in shiny black leather (which will allow her to double, at a key moment, as a garbage bag), meeting a dude she’d connected to on a dating app — except that he thought he was going to be meeting the porno doll of his dreams. At a New York bar, his slack-jawed disappointment at seeing Penny, who looks nothing like the buxom sexpot in her site-ad photo, gets flipped on its head when she explains that the woman is her sister, who needs $500 for a boob job before she can meet him. At that point, he’s so hooked on his hook-up fantasy that he’s more than willing to give her the cash. Cut to a casino in Beaumont-sur-Mer, a village along the Riviera where Josephine (Hathaway), in a dress that has more silver sequins than all of Oscar night, pretends to be a wide-eyed and wealthy American bubblehead who cons a Eurotrash gambler into believing that he’s met the very jackpot of gullibility. This allows her to gain possession of his wife’s bejeweled bracelet, the pièce de résistance of the con being Josephine’s sudden arrest and exposure as a con artist — by a tough cop (Ashley McGuire) who’s actually in on the scam. It’s a terrific scene (for a few seconds, your head spins a bit), and the only downside is that it raises the bar on what’s coming next. Josephine has already observed Penny in action during a train trip. And that’s enough to tip her off that she doesn’t want this crass interloper treading on her ritzy home turf. She lives in a modernist villa in Beaumont-sur-Mer, and there’s only room for one queen of the con. But confronted with Penny’s stubborn presence, she agrees to team up with her (as the first act of getting rid of her). “The Hustle” starts off as a vengeful comic fantasy of women using tricks and illusions to exploit the lusty pliability of men. In the movies, the vast majority of con artists have been men (though there are a handful of great female con artists, like the one played by Annette Bening in “The Grifters”), and “The Hustle” is savvy enough to suggest that women, in their everyday lives, have to be 10 times the con artists that men are just to soft-shoe around all the crap that men lay on them. For a while, the prospect of a con-woman movie driven by the motor of sexual politics gives “The Hustle” a lift. It’s when they’re just getting to know each other that Josephine asks Penny, rhetorically, why women are better con artists than men. The reason, says Josephine, is that “no man will ever believe a woman is smarter than he is.” A decade ago, that might have come off as a glib movie line, but in the #MeToo era we recognize it as a pensée with a sting of truth. Men, says Josephine, are wired to want to be the hero of any situation, and as “The Hustle” implies (without stating it outright), it’s really men’s sexual vanity that makes them eternal marks.<doc-sep>It's a scam. Running time: 93 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for crude sexual content and language). Now playing. They’re a couple of dirty, rotten … ladies? The latest comedy to receive a needless gender-switch is the 1988 film “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” which itself was a remake of 1964’s “Bedtime Story” starring Marlon Brando. In “The Hustle,” actors Michael Caine and Steve Martin are unceremoniously shown the door by actresses Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson. But as far as who will own these roles in the hearts and minds of future audience members, Caine and Martin can rest easy on the Riviera: “The Hustle” is just a loony con-job that comes up short on being convincing. The main culprit is Hathaway, who plays Josephine Chesterfield, a high-class con artist who haunts the casino in Beaumont-sur-Mer, France, swindling impressionable older men by falling in love with them. Unfortunately, Anne does not Hathaway with accents. Her British brogue is absurd, and if she can’t fool us, how can she fool a spate of European millionaires? Josephine meets her eventual rival, Penny Rust (Wilson), on a train as Penny is doing her signature move: tricking guys into giving her cash to save her hotter sister. After she succeeds, Wilson even cracks Martin’s joke in which the character orders a mountain of food on the mark’s dime. Indeed, unlike other men-banishing remakes such as “Ghostbusters” and “Ocean’s 8,” which deviate from their source material, “The Hustle” slavishly hews to the script of “Scoundrels,” sometimes even the way scenes are shot. It’s only adjusted for technology — mobile phones, computers, Venmo — and the actresses’ personalities, aka boring and klutzy. Wilson does her usual schtick, filled with Aussie awkwardness, pratfalls and a total abandonment of shame. As always, she is very funny, especially as Hortense the Foul Princess, a character the pair invents to scare away rich dudes, who leave pricey engagement rings behind. She works overtime to make up for Hathaway’s distracted air of superiority. The Glenne Headley role — the main rube — is a tech entrepreneur played by Alex Sharp. The British actor, who’s playing an American, is the only person not treating the movie like an overlong gag. He oozes sincerity as the women compete to rob him of $500K. Without the perfect core duo, “The Hustle” misses the mark. The new con-artist comedy “The Hustle,” starring Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson, is a remake of 1988’s “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” with Michael Caine and Steve Martin. The two follow mostly the same framework — with a few major changes. The duos “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” — Michael Caine plays the mannered Brit, here Lawrence Jamieson, while Steve Martin is the kookly, lowly American Freddy Benson. “The Hustle” — Josephine Chesterfield is now the elegant English con woman with martial-arts skills, and Rebel Wilson is the Aussie swindler Penny Rust, who has a nasty habit of running into walls and slipping on marble floors. The marks “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” — Janet Colgate was a naive American soap heiress played by the late Glenne Headly. “The Hustle” — Thomas is a hoodie-clad tech entrepreneur responsible for inventing a popular mobile app. The challenge “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” — The first person to get $50,000 from Janet wins. (That’s about $122,000 when adjusted for inflation.) “The Hustle” — The winner is the one who is handed $500,000 from Thomas. The crazy royal sibling “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” — Lawrence, pretending to be a prince, has just convinced a wealthy heiress to marry him and take him home — but the catch is she’ll have to also bring his socially wild brother Ruprecht (Martin). “The Hustle” — Trapped in a basement throne room is Josephine’s fake sister, Hortense the Foul Princess (Wilson), who speaks to mannequins and then kicks their ass. The fake disability “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” — To win Janet’s heart — and cash — Freddy disguises himself as a psychosomatically wheelchair-bound Navy veteran. If only he had $50,000 for a cure! “The Hustle” — A slightly more theatrical take, suited to Wilson’s physical comedy style, Penny tells Thomas she is psychosomatically blind.<doc-sep>The fun is in the ridiculous impersonations and accents, or should be. Yet Hathaway and Wilson never get a performance rhythm going; first-time feature film director Chris Addison has many episodes of “Veep” to his credit, but here his technique, especially his facility for slapstick, is practically nil. The whole movie looks cheap. The cost-efficient island of Mallorca, off the coast of Spain, substitutes for the actual Riviera, and you wouldn’t notice or care about the secondhand quality of “The Hustle,” or its reliance on the same hermetic casino or villa interiors, if Addison and company developed any energy in their masquerades.<doc-sep>Anne Hathaway detonates a megaton blast of pure unfunniness in this terrifying film. She leaves behind a mushroom cloud of anti-humour, reducing every laugh possibility to grey-white ash in a postapocalyptic landscape of horror and despair. If J Robert Oppenheimer had witnessed this, he might have staggered out of the cinema auditorium, subjected the foyer to his stricken thousand-yard stare, and murmured that Hathaway had become Death of Comedy, the destroyer of gags. The Hustle is a gender-switch reboot of the Riviera caper Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), which starred Michael Caine as a smooth Brit swindling rich suckers in the south of France, and Steve Martin as his rackety American rival-slash-partner. Now it’s Hathaway playing Josephine, the scam maestro with the couture outfits and the supposedly posh “English” accent. (Surely she will be finally unmasked as American, and there will be a point to how annoyingly fake that voice is? Surely?) And Rebel Wilson does her level best as Penny, the wisecracking underdog grifter who shows up on Josephine’s Riviera turf, making it clear to this entitled princess of confidence trickery that she wants a slice of the action, too. At least jokes make sense coming out of Wilson’s mouth; at least they sound and feel like jokes, even if the script is never much more than ropey. But Hathaway is rigid, inert and gets about as many laughs here as she did doing that song in Les Misérables with her teeth falling out. We’re dreaming a dream of non-hilarity, although, to be entirely fair, the screenwriters aren’t helping her with material about how to pronounce the word “Phuket”. The incredible thing is that the film has many talented people who are entirely wasted. Director Chris Addison has worked with Armando Iannucci on TV’s The Thick of It and Veep and high-calibre performers such as Rebekah Staton and Rob Delaney are similarly thrown away. But what can they do with this script?<doc-sep>
They say it’s all in the timing, especially when it comes to funny business. But in The Hustle everyone’s inner comedic clock is calamitously off. The setups are flat, the jokes don’t land and the actors don’t — or won’t — connect. How does this happen in a movie that stars Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson, two proven experts at the art of farce? Oscar winner Hathaway stole the show from her A-list costars in Ocean’s 8. And Wilson, best known as Fat Amy in the Pitch Perfect franchise, is an Aussie slapstick treasure. And yet The Hustle flutters and sputters and all too quickly goes splat. Shot nearly two years ago and awaiting a release an unsuspecting public should have been spared, this femcentric remake of 1988’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels drops Hathaway and Wilson into the con-artist roles played by Michael Caine and Steve Martin. Years before that, in 1964, David Niven and — wait for it — Marlon Brando played the same parts in Bedtime Story. No one would call either of those films a classic, but they had their moments. This version has only desperation. Any comedian will tell you: Don’t let them see you sweat. This movie damn near drowns in perspiration. Hathaway plays Josephine Chesterfield, a Brit with an outrageously phony accent (she tries on several) who runs a classy scam act on the French Riviera, bilking men out of their money in ways that seem more complicated than necessary — perhaps to pad a plot that barely wheezes to a finish at 93 minutes? Wilson takes the role of Penny Rust, a low-rent version of Josephine who decides to horn in on her rival’s territory. The two team up to clean out a young, Internet tycoon, played by Alex Sharp, who became the youngest actor to win a Tony award for Best Play as the autistic protagonist of Broadway’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Sad to see him reduced to playing stooge in cheap gags that are older than he is. In his feature directing debut, Welsh comedian Chris Addison labors mightily to pretend he’s still calling the shots on the satiric heaven of HBO’s Veep. He’s not. And the formula script by Jac Schaeffer (she pitched in on Captain Marvel) does him no favors. For every decent one-liner — Penny tells a posh waiter, “I’m salad intolerant” — dozens more slide into the black hole of deserved oblivion. And so it goes. Everyone in The Hustle has seen better days, and will surely see them again. Right now, though, it’s the audience that gets grifted.