“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. Josephine and Penny join forces for the Lord of the Rings scam, in which Josephine pretends to be a very distant member of the royal family, who cons a series of men, starting with a Texas zillionaire (Dean Norris), into asking for her hand in marriage, at which point, with a rock the size of a marble on her finger, she unveils her “sister,” Hortense, played by Wilson as a hellion who’s like a reject from the Addams Family. The men, at this point, just want to flee, and are willing to leave the rock behind to do so. It’s a funny scam, and we wait for the movie to escalate from there. But while “The Hustle” maintains a tone of confectionary amorality, instead of building toward its logical climax — the ultimate con pulled on male piggishness — it begins to play like “Ocean’s Two” with a soft-focus target. The grand mark the two women settle on is Thomas, a wealthy tech star who invented a popular app. He’s played by Alex Sharp as a kind of saintly boyish Mark Zuckerberg who’s too good to be true. The women, who at this point are official rivals, work a con that’s also a contest between them: Wilson turns herself into the most innocent of love objects by pretending to be suffering from hysterical blindness, and Hathaway, in bangs and tomato-red lipstick, impersonates “Dr. Schuffhausen,” the stern German super-physician who can cure her. As all this plays out, the last half of the 94-minute movie becomes simultaneously the pair’s most ambitious scam; a showdown of feminine wiles; a seduction that holds a wispy hint of true romance; and the duo’s comeuppance. With all that in play, it becomes less clear who, and what, we’re rooting for, and the movie starts to lose its cheeky point-of-view and more than a bit of its pulse. It sounds churlish to complain too much about “The Hustle,” because both actresses are winning, and the movie just wants to be a spiked dessert of a crime caper. But these are amoral times, and the reason “The Hustle” may not find much momentum after its opening weekend is that it starts off as a tale of dirty rotten scoundrels but ultimately turns more amiably silly than acidic.<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>Review: Go Into the Pleasantly Misandrist ‘The Hustle’ With No Knowledge of ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ and You’ll Have More Fun By Roxana Hadadi | Film | May 10, 2019 | Hats off to Anne Hathaway. In the past three years or so, the actress we used to revel in dunking on has made an increasingly interesting set of career choices, from the criminally underseen Colossal to her amusingly campy turn in Ocean’s 8 to the absolutely bonkers Serenity, which Kristy covered for us in great detail. And The Hustle is another stretching-her-skills turn for Hathaway, who switches between an impressive array of languages and an even flashier selection of pantsuits for her turn as a sophisticated and haughty con artist. Her self-serious, urbane air clashes nicely with Rebel Wilson’s gustily vulgar turn, and together the two of them make The Hustle pleasantly uncouth. These women belittle each other and scheme against one another and compete in a way that demonstrates their contrasting approaches to using men to get what they want. Because what they want is money, of course, and what they’ll do to get it is most anything that punishes men for their sexism and their shallowness and provides the women with enough to dress nicely and eat nicely and live nicely. Just a few hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars or whatever. The essentials! The Hustle is a remake of 1988’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with Michael Caine in the Hathaway role and Steve Martin in the Wilson role, and that film from director Frank Oz, who would secure his cinematic legacy with 1991’s What About Bob?, was itself a remake. The original original was 1964’s Bedtime Story, with David Niven in the Caine and Hathaway role and Marlon Brando in the Martin and Wilson role, and you can see the pattern here—each of these previous films centered the narrative on male con artists. This time around, The Hustle focuses on Josephine Chesterfield (Hathaway) and Penny Rust (Wilson, who thankfully hasn’t said anything Extremely Wrong this press tour), who cross paths on a train to Beaumont-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, a town advertised as a “playground for the rich” in a magazine article Penny picks up while fleeing from police. That piece sent Penny packing for Europe, where she’s using a Taken-style sob story about her missing sister and her auctioned-off virginity to snag free meals (with three slices of cake!) and spending money from well-off “nice” guys. These wealthy men would never look at Penny twice but will gladly support her as she tries to save her hot, busty sister from evil bearded men on yachts (cough, Muslims, the movie means Muslims), and so Penny has no qualms taking their money. Witnessing one of these exchanges, Josephine realizes that the miniature empire she runs in Beaumont-sur-Mer—where she has a small crew of people who help execute her cons, including a local police detective (Ingrid Oliver, from Doctor Who)—is in jeopardy. The town isn’t big enough for two female hustlers, and so Josephine first tries to drive out Penny, and then to train her. The two have wildly different styles, and a wager is eventually made: The first woman who can get $500,000 out of a tech millionaire, Thomas (Alex Sharp), gets to stay in Beaumont-sur-Mer. What follows are increasingly elaborate and bizarre displays of the women one-upping each other and trying to reveal the other as a fraud while securing their own financial windfall. I haven’t seen Dirty Rotten Scoundrels or Bedtime Story, and so I walked into The Hustle blind—and I would suggest that if you can stay away from spoilers, do so. The movie follows the plots of the other films so closely (which I now realize from some Wiki-ing) that I’m not sure how enjoyable it would be if you could guess every beat coming. And while the movie’s overall plot is, like so many heist movies, somewhat predictable, I appreciated the surprises I received from going in totally unaware of what was to come, from the various double-crosses to the introduction of certain characters that take the narrative in increasingly ludicrous directions. How women feel about these gender-swapped remakes, a la this film and last year’s Ocean’s 8, in which Hathaway also co-starred, certainly varies. They are unarguably derivative in that they fail to provide original stories for women and instead repackage narratives initially crafted for men, but to the credit of The Hustle, it’s at least written by a woman, Jac Schaeffer, who also helped pen Captain Marvel. Schaeffer’s script provides an enjoyable raunchiness to this redo that helps sell the women’s rivalry and their prevailing disdain toward men. We all know from Wilson’s previous roles, including February’s Isn’t It Romantic, that she can effectively walk the line between disgusting and hilarious, and she’s fully on here; I lost it when she disparagingly called a priceless fossil a “dinosaur clitoris,” or when she went tit for tat with Veep’s relentlessly misogynistic Timothy Simons after catfishing him. And both Wilson and Hathaway engage in self-aware physical humor that demonstrates their characters’ knowledge of how people view them, and how they can use that to their advantage. It’s in the way Hathaway tries to grind up on some guy while maintaining spiteful eye contact with Wilson, whose character is pretending to be blind at the time; it’s how Wilson’s choice of clothing allows her to blend into the background, even in an array of trash bags. Hathaway’s Josephine considers the term “a good man” to be an oxymoron; she feels no guilt over conning men who cheat on their wives or who think that immigrants shouldn’t be allowed into the United States or who have destroyed the environment. In contrast, Wilson’s Penny just wants to have a good time—she doesn’t want men to fall in love with her, which is Josephine’s M.O., but she wants to make them feel bad for not doing so. To the credit of Schaeffer’s script, the film doesn’t come down one way or another on judging either of these women, and director Chris Addison—who has directed more than a dozen episodes of Veep, another pop culture product in which characters derive vicious glee from insulting each other—does a solid job capturing these women’s differences without prioritizing one over the other. The entire premise of the film is that you’ll sympathize with these criminals, or at least understand what societal ills they think they’re personally rebelling against with their schemes, and there’s spunk to the story when the women don’t get along, when Josephine calls Penny a “moon-faced troll” and Penny fires back that Josephine is a “animatronic cocktease.” If your idea of feminism is that women don’t need to blindly support each other solely on the basis of gender, that they can be competitive and conniving and still each individually contribute in the war against men, and if you think the stank that Wilson puts on the word “tits” is like no one else in the business, then The Hustle will probably work for you. Take joy in how Hathaway’s tone finds that perfect medium between a sneer and a smile and how she can weaponize those Disney princess eyes into a glare or a tear. Be amazed at how zealously Wilson plays the part of a deranged Ophelia—forced to wear a chastity belt!—in a scam the women call the Lord of the Rings. The gender-swapped The Hustle may be born out of a lazy idea, but its misandrist energy carries it along nicely. ← Donald Trump Told the Visiting Red 'Socks' That Lincoln Lost the Civil War | The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly About John Singleton → Roxana Hadadi is a Senior Editor for Pajiba. You can follow her on Twitter. Image sources (in order of posting): Epk.tv/MGM, Epk.tv/MGM, Epk.tv/MGM<doc-sep>
It’s the season of the hipster grifter (one of whom, Anna Sorokin, was sentenced to 12 years in prison Thursday) and a government obsessed with doing all the crimes itself, so you’d think it’s the perfect time for a goofy comedy about two savvy, sexy con women, right? Sure — but not if that movie is “The Hustle,” a would-be subversive, gender-swapped remake of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin, which is itself a remake of the 1964 film, “Bedtime Story,” which starred Marlon Brando and David Niven. “Scoundrels” remains absurd and wonderful (“Ruprecht, do you want the genital cuff?") and you should rent it instead of seeing “The Hustle.” Or, if you’re in the mood for killer femmes taking advantage of hapless dudes while decked out in haute couture, check out “Ocean’s 8,” which actually shows off Hathaway’s comedic chops in a way that riffs on her perfectly polished Hollywood image. What’s remarkable about both of these movies is that the cons themselves are silly, If not downright ludicrous, but the onscreen chemistry, writing and French Riviera glitz speeds along the narrative so quickly you don’t notice. The attitude of “Ocean’s 8” towards men isn’t much warmer than that of “The Hustle” — rarely are they given more than bit parts in the “Ocean’s” narrative, and the butchest character is played by Cate Blanchett in a dizzying array of fierce ensembles — but it’s much savvier and subtle. SIGN UP FOR THE THINK WEEKLY NEWSLETTER HERE In “The Hustle,” directed by Chris Addison, our two anti-heroes lack any particularly interesting characteristics that might give the viewer something to hold on to. Rebel Wilson co-stars as Lonnie/Penny, the scrappy, somewhat stupid corollary to Steve Martin’s Freddy/Ruprecht, and Anne Hathaway plays Josephine, a British ice queen who is the onscreen equivalent of Michael Caine’s character Lawrence. Where Freddy is sleazy, Lonnie is bumbling; where Freddy finagles freebies out of his marks, Lonnie mostly just confuses them or keeps talking until they give up. As the “low rent” half of the pair, Lonnie’s favorite activities are catfishing men on dating apps and then swindling them, eating messily and having sex. (Wow, a horny, hungry, plus-size female character — what a unique concept.) Lonnie’s main con is that when she meets up with a man she’s been catfishing and he’s inevitably disappointed that she’s not the outrageously buxom babe he’s been texting, she convinces him that the woman is her sister and she needs money for a breast augmentation. When she’s busted by police during a bar date with “Veep’s” Timothy Simons, the previous victim shouts, “That’s the fake tit job bitch!” (That this set-up is deeply unlikely to have worked in 2019 is never addressed.) Lonnie, at least, gets the most narrative development, such as it is; she reveals that she only robs the men she’s been catfishing if she meets them and they’re disappointed to get her instead of the babe in the photo... that she herself picked and sent them. Josephine is frigid and humorless but well-coiffed, and Hathaway occasionally flips on her Hollywood charm to lure in suitors with large diamond rings and other goodies. In one particular scene, she gives a glimpse of what “The Hustle” could have been, when she flips between various accents and languages in a meta-con. In what passes for “Odd Couple”-style banter, though, Josephine is subjected to fangless zingers from Lonnie, whose quips include that Josephine “looks like a librarian corpse but less lively.” Josephine and Lonnie’s tête-à-tête is equally humorless; the only thing on which they agree is that men are the perfect marks, because they don’t expect women to outsmart them, and women are “used to faking it,” as per Lonnie. Such is the gender humor in “The Hustle.” Where the grifters of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” lean into the soft-hearted ways of simple womenfolk, Lonnie and Josephine use sex and/or stupidity to manipulate modern Neanderthals. The sexism, like Martin’s physical gags, hasn’t aged well. Once they’re forced to work together, Lonnie takes on the Steve Martin role and plays Josephine’s sister; at one point, she dresses up like a medieval princess with very bad teeth who lives in a tricked-out cell in their home’s basement, along with her “court” full of mannequins.