Based on a true story, Hustlers follows the lives of two strippers in New York who come up with a way to make extra money: drug their customers and obtain their credit card details. Their justification being that men have been exploiting them personally for years and the guys they are doing it to are loathsome Wall Street types who are screwing the country.
Whilst that point of view has its merits neither of the co-stars, Jennifer Lopez (Ramona) or Constance Wu (Destiny) manage to bring enough warmth to their characters to have me rooting for them, though at least Lopez seems more comfortable in this role than she did in the misfiring A Second Act earlier in the year.
Ramona and Destiny don’t seem any more likable than the men they are conning, and despite making noises about providing for their kids, all we see is them spending their cash on high-end clothes and bags and lots of alcohol. I suppose scenes of them depositing money into a account would not have been very sexy! Also, there is little intricacy to their scheme, which leads to a lot of the film being pretty repetitive, and the tensions between the pair, required to give the second part of the film some impetus, feel too forced.
Director Lorene Scataria, with her sound crew, does provide some interesting technical flourishes, and the years of excess followed by bust of 2008 are convincingly portrayed. However, there is just not enough substance to sustain a feature length film.
Rating: 5.5 out of 10