Two con women are about to go into battle with one another in an attempt to pull of the best con, both aiming for the same man. But will they be able to put feelings aside and go through with it all in the end?
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When you hear that a film is one of the worst of that year and truly terrible, you missed it at the cinema what is the first thing to do when said film appears on a streaming service? Well, watching it of course despite everything bad you have heard. Giving it the good old, "surely it cannot really be that bad". I guess you can already guess the direction this review is therefore going in. That's right it is even more terrible than you could possibly have imagined, although one thing did give me a surprise.
Penny Rust has no money left and struggling to get by she leads men on with a fake photo of her "sister" that they have been talking to via a dating app/website. She then gives off a sob story and manages to fleece them for some money all a big con! When she meets Josephine Chesterfield on a train the pair are drawn into the same world as they both have different styles when it comes to the cons they try to pull off. As they both target Thomas a very wealthy man who created his own app and fortune.
The biggest surprise I actually found within the film was that Rebel Wilson and her character of Penny did not actually annoy me. I have never really been her biggest fan but she was actually ok in the film, I realise that doesn't sound like the best compliment but she really was alright. On the other hand I was left confused to why Anne Hathaway decided that this was a good career move, already an Oscar winner with a very impressive backlog of films being in The Hustle did and does seem like a strange choice.
This is one of those films that have been forced in an attempt to have good female characters, doing the whole gender swap thing to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The issue though? Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is actually a really good film and The Hustle is a very poor pretender that just does not work at all. Why couldn't they actually change the plot and just have the base of the story with two con artists that now just happen to be female? I have seen the musical version on stage as well, which is all exactly the same. Something else that drew my attention is that considering it is a total copy of the other film it had four people write the script, which I find rather baffling to be brutally honest. So it as another film with the forced female leads that actually could have been done in a very successful manner but instead they went for the "easy" option for gender swapping. Disappointing.
