This remake of
There is a smart movie nestled somewhere in director Chris Addison’s romp, “The Hustle,” but you have to weed through a whole lot of foolery to get to it. The new film is ripe for big laughs with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson as, respectively, the snobby British bombshell with sticky fingers and the rough-around-the-edges though equally cunning con artist, but neither actress is given rich enough material to bring the film’s most interesting ideas to the finish line.
Hollywood has had a growing fascination with the female swindler (think “Widows” or even “Oceans 8,” which also stars Hathaway), often to confront a larger issue of sexism and lack of female agency. And for about the first 20 minutes of “The Hustle,” it looks like screenwriter Jac Schaeffer — sharing credit with her antecedents, the creators of 1964’s “Bedtime Story,” Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning, as well as Dale Launer, who wrote that film’s 1988 remake, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” — is also trying to illustrate gender issues as well.
For instance, one of the first scenes points to how superficial men are in the dating space and how they think of women as vulnerable and thoughtless in order to take advantage of them. Penny (Wilson) is catfishing a guy (Timothy Simons, “Veep”) who thinks he’s at the bar to meet a buxom blonde with whom he’s been messaging for a month; instead, he’s duped by Penny pretending to be his date’s sister, claiming his text-girlfriend is too shy to show up in person because she’s only an A-cup and can’t afford a boob job. Spoiler alert: the guy with the paper-thin personality is willing to do whatever it takes — even Venmo-ing Penny hundreds of dollars on the spot — for the breast enhancement of a made-up woman in whom he’s only interested in for sex anyway. It’s one of those funny-because-it’s-true moments in the film that point out a real issue but fail to interrogate it.
