Luckily, you can do a lot with the basic premise:
two con artists with different styles compete for the same mark. In this case,
Anne Hathaway plays the sophisticated Josephine Chesterfield who has amassed a
fortune by scamming rich men along the French Riviera. Rebel Wilson is Penny
Rust, a small fish who shows up and threatens to ruin Josephine's setup by
calling more attention to her scams. They agree to con a young tech
millionaire, Thomas Westerburg (Alex Sharp) out of $500,000 as a "loser
leaves town" competition. As their competition gets more heated, the lies
they tell escalate in often very funny ways.
Both lead roles play to the actress' strengths. Anne
Hathaway works best in a comedy either playing the straight woman or being able
to play exaggerated characters. In The Hustle, she's able to do both.
There's more than a little Daphne Kluger from Ocean's Eight in Josephine
Chesterfield. Rebel Wilson is better the bigger and brasher she can be. She's
excellent when her character thinks she's the smartest person in the room,
constantly undermines that assertion, then occasionally takes advantage of
everyone's lowered expectations. They play off each other much better than I
expected. Hathaway is a strong enough performer to keep Wilson in check, so she
doesn't steamroll the movie. In turn, Wilson's lack of vanity pushes Hathaway to
be sillier than she would be otherwise.
Normally, I hate this kind of story. Neither
Josephine nor Penny tell particularly believable lies. A lot of the humor in
the movie relies on me believing that Thomas is too stupid to see through the
two cons' lies. Here's what bothers me about that. A well written character has
depth. You can believe he existed before the movie starts and will continue to
exist after it ends. You can imagine a series of events (a life lived) that
results in this character existing at the moment he enters the movie. In Blast
From the Past, Brendan Fraser is trapped in a bunker for the first 30 years
of his life. That explains how he can marvel at every new thing he sees above
ground, and that explains how he doesn't pick up on any social cues. It's an
absurd character borne out of absurd circumstances, but I understand why he is
the way he is. In The Hustle, Thomas presumably lived an average life.
He made a successful phone app that suggests a decent understanding of what
people like, and he was able to turn this into a profitable business venture.
There's no way the gullible, guileless character that we meet in the movie
could've gotten where he is at the beginning of the movie. He's a rags to
riches success, not a trust fund kind. I literally don't see how Thomas could
exist out of the frame of the camera in any scene. But, the movie has a very
important twist: he's conning Penny and Josephine. That one fact changes
everything. That character only does exist while he's in the frame of
the camera. He's putting on a show just as much as Josephine and Penny are. His
role is to let them escalate their absurdity. Instantly, the movie gets a lot
easier to digest. Having seen Dirty Rotten Scoundrels before, I knew
this twist going in and it actually made this movie funnier for me. Instead of
being annoyed that the movie was trying to sell me this bill of goods,
believing Josephine and Penny's gambits were working, I could laugh at the
insane escalation, knowing that there was a good reason that it was allowed to
continue. Without that, I surely would've hated the movie. With it, I was able
to find it quite charming.
All else being equal, I'd rather watch Michael Caine
and Steve Martin in these roles over Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson, even though
I have nothing against the latter pair. Gleene Headly is also an upgrade over
Alex Sharp. The Hustle has a lot of dead spots, especially before the
big con, that just aren't very funny. It tries to make some commentary about
how awful and stupid men can be which went a little too broad to really land
any punchlines. Ironically, the twist at the end undoes a lot of the power of
swapping the genders in this version. Instead of being a movie about two men
getting outsmarted by a woman, The Hustle ends up being a movie about
two women bragging about how stupid men are who then get duped by a man. I
suppose that's a different kind of gender parity.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment