Dirty Rotten Scoundrels had a fantastic teaser: A dapper Michael Caine is strolling besides a casual Steve Martin down the shores of the French Riviera. The voiceover expounds upon the noble virtues of moviedom hinting that this film would aspire to such. The two men pass the camera and it follows them from the back as they walk away. The voiceover continues. Towards the end of their minute-long walk, they pass an old woman bent over the shoreline to investigate something in the water, and as the men pass, Martin gently reaches out and pushes the woman into the sea. The voiceover halts, and then adds “this isn’t that movie.” Ahhh, few trailers have ever made me want to see a film like I wanted to see Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
Scoundrels remake The Hustle doesn’t have a trailer that made me wish to see the film. Instead, it substituted Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson for Caine and Martin figuring it wouldn’t make a difference to the integrity of the plot. They’re right; it didn’t. Of course, now I have to rethink whether or not I truly enjoyed Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; I remember the trailer being, by far, the part of the experience.
It’s not a good sign when you spend the first two paragraphs talking about another film and not the one you watched. In a sea of mediocrity, The Hustle didn’t drown, exactly, but you kinda have to be a fan of either lead to be rapt with the experience. Penny (Wilson) is a small time grifter. She’s the kind of woman who would happily use a dating app to blackmail a dude, but only after first confirming he’s cheating scum. Gal’s gotta have her morals, sorta, right? Josephine Chesterfield (Hathaway) is le professional con artiste. Already worth zillions, Josephine still owns moronic oil barons just for the fun of it. As she already resides on a breachfront Riviera estate and employs a small team of servant swindlers, Josephine’s motivation in teaming with Penny escaped me. For the sake of the story, her l’il French town ain’t big enough for a lone Rebel. Can these two women set aside their petty differences and learn to rip-off people together? Gee, I hope so.
Rebel Wilson films are a tad formulaic these days. They pair her with a conventional beauty queen – Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Anna Kendrick — and contrast beauty with beast, so-to-speak. As Wilson seems to have no boundaries on camera and is completely at home in her over-the-top everything, she gets to play the fool constantly while beauty shows us how “normal” people might act. I think this is why I enjoyed Isn’t It Romantic — Rebel got to be the protagonist instead of the sideshow. When you wear a dress deliberately chosen to look like a trashbag, as she does in The Hustle, odds are you’re a sideshow.
The timing on The Hustle seemed awesome seeing as how Alabama went all medieval on women’s rights this week. Perhaps a feminist con movie was exactly the ticket needed to lighten the mood and balance the scales. But, of course, there’s a big difference between the feminism of Ocean’s 8 and anti-women legislation. As such, The Hustle fails on two counts: it’s certainly nowhere near the call to feminism it might have hoped, nor did it present a picture that turned out to be much more than an extended Abbott & Costello routine: Rebel arrives and wrecks something while Anne smiles like she’s still a European princess. It is only my love of Rebel Wilson and Anne Hathaway that allows me to enjoy The Hustle on any level.
To Lady Wilson I give great applause
Whether she blunders or commits a faux pas
Don’t stifle her diddle
By making her second fiddle
I like my Rebel without a clause
Rated PG-13, 94 Minutes
Director: Chris Addison
Writer: Stanley Shapiro & Paul Henning and Dale Launer and Jac Schaeffer
Genre: The lighter side of scamming
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Desperate feminists
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: “Seen it.”
