STXfilms
Hustlers has been winning raves from critics and audiences on the festival circuit, and I have to be honest in saying that I went back and forth for about a week before finally committing to seeing the movie. When it was at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and some headlines were dubbing it ‘the film of the year’, I felt that it was my duty to check it out and report back to our readers. So here goes …
Hustlers is based on a true story, actually based on an article in New York magazine by Jessica Pressler titled ‘The Hustlers at Scores’. For the film, the names have been changed to protect the guilty and the not-so-guilty and some of the facts have been given some finessing to bring a bit more comedy to the film while also making the central character appear a bit more sympathetic … because we need someone to root for, right?
Constance Wu plays Dorothy, who in 2007 takes up stripping under the name Destiny to help support her grandmother. But being the new girl at Moves means she’s completely taken advantage of by the sleazy owner and manager who expect a cut of her tips. When Destiny sets her eyes on Ramona, she knows that is who she wants to be when she grows up. And, surprisingly, Ramona takes her under her wing (or fur coat as it were) and shows her the ropes, giving Destiny lessons on how to really work the pole and how to give a proper lap dance that will earn her the best tips. And then … the big stock market collapse sends the club’s clientele, mostly Wall Street types from the desk jockeys to the one-percenters, scurrying, leaving the club almost empty night after night.
Ramona, Destiny and the others have to find new jobs to pay the bills but when Destiny returns to the club to pick up some extra cash, Ramona strolls in with a man and another girl, Annabelle, who seems to be Ramona’s new protegé (although we never really know because none of the supporting characters get much of a backstory). Destiny and Ramona are thrilled to see each other again and Ramona comes up with a plan — reach out to their regulars from the old days (strippers get names and phone numbers of the guys who come to the club?!?) and exact their revenge for crashing the stock market by working with the club to max out the guys’ credit cards. Of course they need a plan to do that so a little drugging helps. They give them a combo of drugs that make them have a good time and then wipe their memories so they don’t know what happened until they get their credit card bill. And it works … until it doesn’t and people start getting hurt, something Destiny is not comfortable with. Ramona could not care less and start recruiting new girls, quite recklessly, that puts the entire operation in danger. So do they get away with it? You’ll have to see the movie (or read the article) to find out.
There is good and there is bad in Hustlers. The good is Constance Wu who does a nice job of balancing the innocent, family-focused Dorothy (she eventually has a child with a lout of a boyfriend) with the money-hungry Destiny. The great is Jennifer Lopez giving probably her best performance ever. Ramona is tough, she’s savvy, she’s smart, and she genuinely cares for Destiny and all the other girls from the club who join their operation. But Ramona falls prey to the same thing that the people she’s punishing fell prey to: the love of money. Once her scheme started working, she got careless, and Lopez makes Ramona’s change in personality real, pushing Ramona and Destiny apart, but still having that love for her in times of tragedy. It really is a great performance, and on top of that Lopez also looks fabulous when she makes her entrance in the stage and does her moves on the pole (and I’m pretty sure Lopez was doing most, if not all, of her pole work). Wu is supposed to be the lead (she did allegedly demand top billing) but Lopez outshines her whenever she’s on screen.
The other girls barely register. Lili Reinhart’s Annabelle’s schtick is that she pukes whenever she gets nervous or upset. But we never know how she met Ramona (we do know she got kicked out of her parents’ house when she revealed she was working as a stripper and her brothers won’t talk to her anymore). Keke Palmer has some good moments as Mercedes. Lizzo is another of the girls at the club but she barely registers, and I can’t honestly say if she was part of the group or not. Sadly, Cardi B is not part of the group and she should have been. She was terrific as Diamond, but we never really saw her outside of Moves and she pretty much disappears after the stock market crash. Hustlers could have used more Cardi B. You may have noticed there is no mention of any male actors here. That’s because this is supposed to be a movie about ‘female empowerment’ so all of the men are nothing but stereotypes and victims used for comic and tragic effect.
The movie itself is a bit of a mess structurally. I loved the opening when we first meet Destiny backstage and the first thing you hear is the opening lines of Janet Jackson’s ‘Control’: ‘This is a story about control, my control …’ That is meant to perfectly set up the film’s story and it was brilliant. But why the director decided to drop us into the middle of Destiny’s interview with the reporter (here named Elizabeth, and played by Julia Stiles) that then makes everything we’ve seen and will continue to see flashbacks to what happened is a bit jarring. Why not start out with that? It was an odd choice. The other problem with the story is that it wants us to side with the women, cheer them on as they take down the men who almost took down the country but … aside from a couple of bigwigs, a lot of the guys they victimized were just poor schlubs doing their jobs. One guy they rolled lost all of his money, including his mortgage payment and may have lost his house in the process … and on top of that he has an autistic child to care for. What ever sympathy you were supposed to have for Ramona and her gang is pretty much tossed out the window at that point. The film wants this to be a female-empowered Robin Hood story, but in the end the women are really no better than the Wall Street guys, so you kind of feel a bit icky afterwards. The end of the movie does give us a brief bit of information about what happened with Ramona and Destiny, but it also leaves us hanging about their relationship past that. Destiny is always asking Elizabeth what Ramona said about her, so she obviously still feels a sisterly connection but … do they ever connect again? Who knows. I think if the movie is going to keep reminding us of that bond the two had, we should get some resolution with that.
The movie is shot well, has great performances and music, but it’s hardly what one would call ‘the film of the year.’ It has its moments, but the one reason to make it rain at the box office is Jennifer Lopez. She’s never been highly regarded as an actor — and I remember first seeing her acting on the 1993 primetime soap Second Chances (of course she was an In Living Color Fly Girl before that) and really liking her — so I think this performance will win over even her harshest critics. Now if she can just produce a movie that actually has some story structure to it.
Hustlers has a run time of 1 hour 50 minutes and is rated R for pervasive sexual material, drug content, language and nudity. No one under 17 will be admitted without attending adult.
Share this post
