The biggest con in "The Hustle" is that the ball of comedy fire Rebel Wilson and the versatile Anne Hathaway have come together to make a movie that is supposed to be entertaining. That's criminally not the case. What they have dropped is an insulting reimagining of the clever 1988 feature "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" built on uninspired writing and predictable plot twists.
The tragedy starts with Penny Rust (Wilson), a two-bit hustler who arrives in a swank European community where master con artist Josephine Chesterfield (Hathaway) has been making a good living off rich visitors. The arrival of competition _ even someone as uncouth as Rust _ doesn't sit well with Chesterfield, and the pair make a bet with the stakes being who gets to continue to stay where there is an endless supply of scammable men.
It's style vs. substance as Chesterfield banks on charm and seduction to make her money while Rust steals from her marks using more of a brute force attack. The competing approaches come into play when the two women focus on the person who will settle their bet. Their target is the naive Thomas Westerburg (Alex Sharp), a tech whiz kid who turned an idea into mountains of cash.
"The Hustle" is basically a gender-swap of "Scoundels." There's nothing wrong with such an approach, especially if it comes with a smart new game plan. This film has no such design in the script, and it ends up banking heavily on the natural comedy of the lead actors to carry 99.99% of the load. What would have been a better approach is to take the gender change of the main characters one step further and instead of Wilson being reduced to having to do all the physical comedy, she could have been the more refined character.
Wilson showed with her recent work in "Isn't It Romantic" that she can do more than fall on her rear end. She just needs to get more opportunities where she can show off her creative writing skills. Granted, there's no guarantee "The Hustle" would have been better, but it could not have been any worse.
Hathaway had to know the film had problems as she starred in the infinitely better con gender-swapping comedy "Ocean's 8." That was both a smart and entertaining role for her to play that was made all that much better by a solid script. What Hathaway has to deal with in "The Hustle" is writing and direction that created her most disappointing work since co-hosting the 2011 Oscars.
It becomes obvious quickly that the majority of director Chris Addison's work behind the camera has been in television as he treats the film as if it were a small-screen offering. That's why he never seems to shy away from an endless string of pratfalls and silly training sequences that have been sitcom mainstays for years just to pad the film, rather than pushing the writing by Jac Schaeffer ("TiMER") to be smarter.
The only way a movie built around con artists works is if the writing is so intelligent that at least one major twist will get a gasp from the audience. Sadly, the big twist here is so obvious, the only way it could have been more transparent would have been to buy a major billboard outside every movie complex with the twist printed in massive letters.
It only takes a few minutes to realize "The Hustle" has little going for it other than Wilson and Hathaway. Both give their best efforts, but there's only so much life that can be breathed into a cinematic carcass that is DOA (Devoid of Amusement).
