Hustlers Review: 8 Ups & 3 Downs
Jennifer Lopez's stripper hustle is one of the year's best...
Every year, there are films that you just know are going to unfairly fly under the radar because of what's released around them. Hustlers, hopefully, won't quite fit into that category, but it already feels like it's not going to be seen by nearly enough people. Sure, it's opened with Jennifer Lopez's biggest ever opening, but that's... not that great an accolade when the specifics are explored.
Hustlers, without hyperbole, is one of the best films of the year, by some distance. Like lots of great movies based on magazine articles, it has a depth and a compelling story behind it that most films would kill for and there's a sort of enigmatic charm here that takes it up a notch even further.
If you're reading reviews to see if you should go and see it, stop now and go and see it. We'll discuss it afterwards, when you'll agree that it's excellent. But that's not enough of a review and as is the fashion round here, we're looking at this from both sides of the floor to see what worked and what might have been improved.
First, the positives...
Ups
8. It's Incredibly Good At Tricking Your Moral Compass
You'd think that a film about a group of people - regardless of their background or profession - using a cocktail of ketamine and MDMA to drug rich targets and fleece them of all of their money would have pretty strongly drawn moral lines. You'd be forgiven for assuming, for instance, that those people would be the cut and dried villains, particularly when it leads to one target losing his house and his job.
But one of the most skilful things Hustlers does is present the titular hustlers as sort of Robin Hood types, because their targets work for the same major banks whose criminal activity destroyed the world economy in 2008. Most of the bankers featured were allowed to continue without accountability, so why SHOULDN'T they be robbed?
Yes, it's perverse, but the invitation here is to explore what that says about our own morality, rather than it being about fetishising the crimes being shown. To catch that right requires a lot of skill.