Movie Review: Congratulations, "The Hustle", You Played Yourself

Movie Review: Congratulations, "The Hustle", You Played Yourself

Prepare to feel hoodwinked.

In The Hustle, Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson play feuding con artists who compete to see which of them can cheat a tech guru out of $500,000 first. Alas, it’s all an elaborate cover. The real confidence game is unfolding in the cinema, as viewers slowly realise they paid for a ticket to a sometimes line-for-line re-do of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; one about as valuable as a Ronex watch.

It’s not a secret that The Hustle was fashioned as a remake, with Hathaway in the Michael Caine role and Rebel Wilson in Steve Martin’s part. Still, there’s no mention in the opening credits of Scoundrels or even 1964’s Bedtime Story, our creative patient zero. Instead, the decades-dead writers of Bedtime Story, Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning, and the author of Scoundrels, Dale Launer, get a screenplay credit alongside Jac Schaeffer, the only new screenwriter and just one of two still drawing breath. She was the one presumably responsible for search-and-replacing the old character names.

It was at least nice to see that the bones of this 55-year-old story still stand: a shifty grifter (here played by Wilson) horns in on the French Riviera turf of a classy mountebank (Hathaway, of course). Wilson’s Aussie flimflammer rubs Hathaway’s refined Englishwoman the wrong way, but they start working together on a two-person operation that tricks rich men out of their engagement rings. Eventually, however, they go it alone once more, resulting in a winner-takes-all, loser-leaves-France scam: initially to relieve a holidaying, fumbling American rich kid (played by Alex Sharp) of his money, and later, to race into his bed. They finish it in under 90 minutes; the movie, I mean.

Photocopying a working screenplay’s structure isn’t the problem. The problem is that the script is accumulating writers faster than it's accumulating decent jokes. The only parts of The Hustle that kind-of land are the ones that were done better before, and the rest are distinctly worse. The director is Chris Addison, a very funny comic and actor who has been cutting his teeth helming episodes of the subversive and hilarious all-star showcase Veep. There’s no sense of that show’s natural, conversational feel, or even of its hyper-cruel wordplay. What did Addison bring to this? Brevity, I guess. At an hour and a half, The Hustle is the quickest of all three films. If its future remakes get worse from here, at least we can hope that they continue to get shorter too.

Even if you’ve never seen Dirty Rotten Scoundrels before, I don’t know how much you’ll appreciate the clever, zig-zagging plot and its late twists as they’ve been re-enacted in The Hustle. The fact is, by sticking so closely to how the previous pictures played out, the latest flick torpedoes its singular ingenious gambit: swapping the gender of the leads. To say more would be a spoiler. Basically, what was once a sly, charming and deserved ending is now just a bummer.

Hathaway is, as always, doing the most, though it’s all delightful. She conducts an impressive accent-blitzkrieg by dashing through American, British, Australian and German to bamboozle her marks. If there’s any benefit to having The Hustle exist on our current timeline, it’s for Hathaway. Wilson doesn’t fare as well, cursed with the doomed task of restaging Steve Martin bits. She’s one of The Hustle’s producers, meaning this is either hubris or self-sabotage. Congratulations, you played yourself.