Featured Blu-ray and DVD Review: The Hustle

August 19, 2019

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The Hustle

The Hustle’s release date was pushed back a year at the last minute, which is a sign that MGM lost faith in the film. When it was finally released, it did well at the box office, earning nearly $100 million worldwide on a $21 million production budget. Would the film have performed better had the studio had more faith? Or was it lucky it made this much in the first place?

The Movie

The film begins with an introduction to con woman Penny Rust. She’s some guy’s internet date, except she doesn’t look like her profile picture. She isn’t doing this to get a date. She explains that she’s there because the real Madison is too embarrassed to meet the guy, because she’s an A-cup and she’s still saving up for a boob job. It’s not a sophisticated con, but it works well enough to get a few hundreds dollars from this horny idiot, at least until a former victim shows up at the bar with a couple of cops. She gets away, but this is a sign she needs to move on to other targets in distant places.

One opening credits sequence later and we meet Josephine Chesterfield, who is at a high-end casino in Beaumount-Sur-Mer. She’s targeting a much richer man with a much more sophisticated con and a much more successful one. She’s working with a team, Brigitte and Albert, and manages to steal the man’s bracelet. (Or to be more accurate, his wife’s bracelet.) She immediately heads to her buyer in Zürich.

Josephine takes a train back and it is here that she meets Penny and witnesses her con a guy to get a free dinner. When Josephine learns that Penny is planning to travel to Beaumount-Sur-Mer, she tries to persuade her to try another town instead. When that doesn’t work, Josephine has Penny arrested, only to pay for her bail and send her on her way. When that doesn’t work, Josephine offers to train Penny, hoping to torture her with demeaning roles in cons until Penny leaves on her own. When that doesn’t work, there’s an ultimatum. They choose a target, internet millionaire Thomas Westerburg, and whoever cons the money out of him first wins and the loser leaves town forever.

The Hustle

The Hustle is a remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Remakes have a bad reputation, but some of the best movies of all time are remakes, including The Thing, The Maltese Falcon, and ... wait for it... Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The original came out in 1964 and was called Bedtime Story. So being a remake isn’t a real issue, as long as the remake gives audiences a reason to watch the new version and not just stick with the old one. In the case of The Maltese Falcon, it was because the original was pre-Hays Code and couldn’t be shown publicly. The Thing has ground-breaking special effects that would have been just a dream when The Thing From Another World came out in the 1950s. So does this film give a reason to watch it over the original? Sort of.

The gender-bent casting in The Hustle does give the film another angle that the originals didn’t have. When Josephine first agrees to take Penny as an apprentice, she explains why women are so good as con artists. It’s because men never think that a woman could be smarter than they are, so they underestimate them and good con artists use that to their advantage. That’s an interesting element to the movie, one that helps set it apart from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Unfortunately, it isn’t used as much as it needed to be to truly set the film apart and most of the movie is a scene-for-scene remake of the original. There are some genuinely funny moments in the movie, but there are not enough of them to live up to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and too many moments that are just pale imitations of the earlier film.

I have nothing against remakes overall, but sometimes you should just stick with the original.

The Extras

The extras begin with an audio commentary track featuring the director, Chris Addison. There are also a trio of making-of / behind-the-scenes featurettes, Hitting the Mark, Comedy Class, and Con Artists. The three have a combined running time of about 18 minutes, which is not a lot for a first-run release.

The Verdict

I really wanted to love The Hustle, because I love Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and both Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson are talented actresses. However, they are wasted in a film that does almost nothing with what separates it from its predecessor and most fans of the genre would be better off watching Dirty Rotten Scoundrels again than watching this film for the first time. The DVD / Blu-ray doesn’t have enough extras to be worth picking up if you are a fan of the film.

Filed under: Video Review, The Hustle, Casper Christensen, Anne Hathaway, Nicholas Woodeson, Rebel Wilson, Chris Addison, Alex Sharp, Timothy Simons, Ingrid Oliver