Directed by: Lorene Scafaria
Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu, Julia Stiles, Keke Palmer, Lili Reinhart, Lizzo, Cardi B, Mercedes Ruehl
I remember when Jennifer Lopez was simply Jennifer Lopez and not "J-Lo", this overly stylized, overly glamorized brand I can't relate to or identify with. Lopez was effective in her early movies such as Out of Sight and Selena when she was merely an actor, but now I can't separate her from J-Lo, and it stunts the credibility of any movie in which she stars. Her most recent movie was Second Act, in which J-Lo played a supermarket assistant manager who dressed in ensembles far too expensive and flashy for someone of her means. She even wore makeup in the shower. In Hustlers, J-Lo is always seen in attention-grabbing clothing, even at home. Does she ever just wear a t-shirt and sweatpants like the rest of us? Can she not just enter a room without the entrance being shot in slow motion and having two other women following behind her, as if her mere room entry is a cinematic event?
Lopez isn't the only thing wrong with Hustlers, a dull crime drama in which a group of strippers hustle drunk, unsuspecting guys out of their money in the years following the 2008 market collapse.
Before the seismic worldwide economic downturn, J-Lo's Ramona and Constance Wu's (from Crazy Rich Asians) Destiny are making dollar bills rain down on them in a hot Manhattan strip club.
Destiny is new to the game, Ramona is a veteran, and Ramona shows Destiny the ropes on how to maximize every client for every dollar.
Hustlers alternates between different years, as we see Destiny years later spilling her guts to a new York Times reporter (Stiles) about what went down. We know things will end badly, as they are wont to do with these scams, and we witness how the same greed which blew up Wall Street in 2008 also led to the self-destruction of these women who wanted to take these hucksters for all they had.
But unlike Goodfellas, or even The Godfather, Hustlers never takes the journey to the amoral edge
with these characters. The mobsters in Goodfellas and The Godfather were amoral villains, and the
movies never pretended otherwise. The women in Hustlers hide behind some moral code which frankly isn't convincing. The strippers want to take these guys for all they're worth because they bilked millions of hard working people out of their hard earned money with their stock manipulation and legalized thievery. Uh huh.
So, the women who are making beaucoup dollars off of these Wall Street creeps are in it for the little guy? To stand up for all the oppressed peoples who lost their homes and jobs thanks to shady business practices? Give me a break. Hustlers would've better served its people, and the audience, by simply making them hardened con artists from the start, albeit in a different industry. It would've been more fun to watch these working-class women cheat the cheaters and using their own criminal methods to do it, without trying to soften the whole enterprise.
Wu appears she is on the verge of crying in many scenes. She doesn't have it in her to play such a character. We can believe Ramona could do this all day long, but because Lopez is presented in such an overprotected, off-putting style, we are distracted from the performance. Ramona is far from glamorous, so why film her like she is one of the Victoria's Secret models in one of those lame network TV specials? Even her pole dance looks overly choreographed.
As the women do their thing, I cared less and less. They get rich while maxing out these schnooks' credit cards, but soon the feds catch wind of it and brings the whole enterprise crashing down.
Maybe because these ladies are as inconspicuous as a cockroach crawling across a white rug. They
dress like they are attending a cocktail party at the Playboy mansion while combing seedy Manhattan bars for their next victims.
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