The Hustle: The scoundrels aren’t particularly dirty, rotten, or interesting

The Hustle continues to show that Anne Hathaway can hold up the weakest project, but it’s just too unfunny and derivative to be enjoyable.

Hollywood’s newest trend is false empowerment, wherein the act of putting in a woman in place of a man is considered revolutionary. Sure, there are movies where it’s worked, to the detriment of fanboys (ahem, Ghostbusters or Ocean’s 8), but more often than not the movies fail to understand what a woman would actually do in these situations. This is also because these movies are often either still directed and/or written by men.

Enter 2019’s The Hustle, a gender-swapped remake of the 1964 Bedtime Story AND 1988’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The idea of female con artists playing on male stupidity has merits, and there are the briefest of glimmers of this dichotomy found within The Hustle. But too often the movie fails its leading ladies, relying on them as little more than eye candy and unintentionally proving their characters’ point.

Penny (Rebel Wilson) is a small-time con known for catfishing men to rob them blind. When she’s caught for the umpteenth time she sets out for the French Riviera, to a small place supposedly  crawling with wealthy men. Unfortunately the location already has a con artist in the sophisticated Josephine (Anne Hathaway). Josephine makes Penny a wager: first person to con a tech genius, Thomas Westerburg (Alex Sharp), out of half a million wins and the loser has to leave the island forever.

There has always been an attractive allure to the female con artist and good movies have been made about them. (Shameless plug for the 2001 feature, Heartbreakers.) As Hathaway’s Josephine lays out, women are chronically underestimated and no matter a man’s good intentions, there will always be latent sexism. Sharp’s Thomas assuming only a man can be a psychiatrist or the look of disappointment on a mark’s face when he expects a hot girl and sees Penny are prime examples of this. Unfortunately, the three men writing the script appeared to overrule the one credited woman and fell back on the filmic equivalent of monkey see, monkey do.

In this case, the film desperately wishes it was the aforementioned Ocean’s 8. Penny and Josephine exchange in the rapid-fire banter perceived in that film, but don’t have a zippy plot to go with it. In this case, the wager is little more than a facade for an old falling in love plot between Penny and Thomas ripped directly from Heartbreakers. Wilson herself just did a romantic comedy, Isn’t It Romantic, attacking the body shaming and personal unwillingness to fall in love that this feature perceives as hilarious. Thus Wilson is relegated to falling down, being hit, and generally regarded as an unattractive idiot.

Making a contrast so sharp as to be in another movie entirely is Hathaway’s flashy, elegant Josephine Chesterfield. With her sleek wardrobe and overly effusive English accent, she’s playing a character you’d expect her Ocean’s 8 character Daphne Kluger to love. Followed by zippy French music, her performance would seem better suited to A Simple Favor, another movie this film would kill to be. That being said, Hathaway singlehandedly gives this movie the speck of enjoyment it possesses. She’s able to play the cold ice queen with aplomb, rocking the svelte dresses and sunglasses you’d demand from a longtime woman of leisure. We’re never given any indication of who she is as a person, but she looks beautiful and Hathaway pounces on the screen. When she’s played into the campy role of a German-accented doctor, she’s even more engaging, even if the movie makes her look completely dumb.

And that’s what’s really irritating about The Hustle: it sees its women as pointless and inefficient. When Sharp’s Thomas arrives, the movie transitions away from con artistry to give out the hammy and reductive message that all women will find love. However the film’s final sequence appears to undo all that while simultaneously saying that what these two women have accomplished is meaningless and that only with the help of a man can the real movie begin.

Unfortunately that comes right at the end leaving you to ask: what was the point? Give me a movie about Hathaway’s Josephine and her girl Friday/possible lover (oh no, this movie doesn’t even think that smartly), Bridget (played by Ingrid Oliver) and you might have something.

The Hustle is just plain dumb. Wilson’s shtick is so overdone, it’s growing mold, and though Hathaway is the scene stealer she’s doing all the work for zero reward. Ultimately, a wasted opportunity all around.