The Hustle (2019)

Chris Addison's The Hustle arrives as a gender-flipped remake of a remake, tracing its lineage from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels back to Bedtime Story, and it wears that lineage like a slightly too large coat. Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson play dueling con artists on the Riviera, one polished and one feral, competing to fleece a young tech entrepreneur out of his fortune. The production was once titled Nasty Women, a nod to a certain 2016 campaign insult, and Meghan Trainor contributed a song called Badass Woman. The film is aware of its own positioning. It is simply not interested in doing much with it. The inversion is the joke, and the joke is the whole enterprise.

The marks are wealthy men and a software millionaire, which lends a faint whiff of the rich having their pockets picked. Any systemic reading stops there. The film treats swindling as a sport, a gentleman's, or rather a gentlewoman's, recreation, and it never suggests the money ought to go anywhere in particular. The cast is white to a person, and race never enters the frame as a subject. The same holds for the body politics a viewer might expect from a Rebel Wilson vehicle. The cons depend on conventional desirability, and the screenplay does not interrogate that. There is no queer presence, no environmental conscience, no neurodivergent texture, no reconsideration of the historical record. Instead, we get a brisk, glossy caper with a faint message and no pulpit.

Reviews were unkind. The film made its money and moved on. It carries a mild feminine twist and little else, a comedy that gestures at cultural awareness the way a magician gestures at a pocket, hoping no one checks.