The Hustle

(M) ★½

Director: Chris Addison.

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Rebel Wilson, Alex Sharp, Ingrid Oliver, Nicholas Woodeson.

"Wait. Is this a remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels or Twins?"

I'm all for gender-flipped remakes. If we're going to remake pretty much every film, then why not at least get a different perspective on things? And fuck the haters, the Ghostbusters remake was good.

But this is not good. A female-centric remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (which was itself a remake of Bedtime Story) The Hustle has its moments, but you can count them on one hand and they're not that great anyway. As such, it falls well short of its intended target (which I can only assume is to be an hilarious comedy).

Hathaway and Wilson star as the yin-yang con artists going head-to-head on the French Riviera - Hathaway is Josephine, the cultured and meticulous Englishwoman, while Wilson is Penny, the crass yet oddly successful Australian. Can they work together, or will the love of the con drive them apart?

Watch that trailer and you'll see all the funniest bits in the film. Unfortunately, there's another 92 minutes to endure, and despite the best efforts of the Hathaway and Wilson, The Hustle struggles to be either funny or entertaining.

The humour is sporadic partly because the tone is odd but also because the script is so uneven. In places it's weird, then it gets weirder, then it's back to being a low-key farce, then it returns to being way over the top. A so-called Lord Of The Rings con the pair attempt midway through the film sends the film's crazy-meter so far into the red zone it never recovers. 

But mostly the issue lies with The Hustle's lack of subtlety. It sets the bar awkwardly high from the start by making every character and scenario obscenely OTT, thanks mostly to Wilson's unbridled performance and a decision to make every male character a turned-up-to-11 douchebag. Plenty of men are douchebags enough without the film overselling it to the point of ridiculousness. Any points that could have been made about gender issues get lost in a blizzard of silliness. 

Hathaway gives her all in spite of this. Her performance is pretty good, and she has the best strike-rate of funny lines. Wilson sprays her gags like an out-of-control machine-gun, missing way more than she hits. In fact, how much you enjoy The Hustle will depend on how much you can tolerate Wilson. When she's great (like, say, in Pitch Perfect) she's up there with the best filmic funny people of the past 10 years. But here she's poorly served by the material, and her (presumed) ad libs that regularly miss the mark.

The film's inability to find its funnybone, combined with a tone that continually wobbles into bizarre places it struggles to get out of, makes this a criminal disappointment.