Three stars. Rated PG-13, and rather generously, for crude sexual content and profanity
By Derrick Bang
Office workers from the pre-digital era will recall that making copies of copies was an exercise in rapidly diminishing returns.
The results became increasingly smudgy. Less distinct.
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| Having agreed to a May The Best Woman Win grudge match, Josephine (Anne Hathaway, right) seethes quietly when Penny (Rebel Wilson) blunders into a posh casino in the guise of a blind American tourist. |
Less acceptable.
Ergo, the news that we were getting a remake of 1988’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels — which itself is a remake of 1964’s Bedtime Story — was greeted with a gimlet eye (at best).
In fairness, director Chris Addison’s modest little comedy has its moments, most involving the Laurel & Hardy pairing of Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson. The gender reversal is an inspired touch, with Hathaway and Wilson standing in for Michael Caine and Steve Martin (1988), and David Niven and — believe it or not — Marlon Brando (1964).
The core plot beats have been retained, with full acknowledgment to original writers Stanley Shapiro, Paul Henning and Dale Launer. Scripter Jac Schaeffer has punched up this new film’s incidental sight gags, in order to tailor them to these femmes most fatale.
The premise remains the same: Sophisticated con artist Josephine Chesterfield (Hathaway), a seductive Brit with a penchant for fleecing gullible wealthy men of their expensive jewelry, has fashioned a glamorous lifestyle that includes an opulent home in the French Riviera’s Beaumont-sur-Mer.
Half a world away, low-level grifter Penny Rust (Wilson) rips off neighborhood bar low-lifes (making a point of targeting shallow jerks with a visible antipathy to her plus-size presence).
Collectively, they’re a welcome switch in this #MeToo era. God knows there are plenty of piggish men — of all social standings — who deserve serious comeuppance.
But whereas Josephine’s stylish scams have been honed to polished perfection — with the assistance of her urbane butler, Albert (Nicholas Woodeson), and the cheerfully corrupt local police captain, Brigitte Desjardins (Ingrid Oliver) — Penny’s sloppier, smash ’n’ grab approach has its drawbacks. Forced to flee the long arm of legitimate law, she impulsively winds up in Beaumont-sur-Mer.
Where Josephine is less than pleased to see such a vulgar, low-rent opportunist on her turf.
At first blush, the problem appears minor; Penny isn’t the sharpest tack in the box, and tricking her to another posh French locale seems the easiest way out. When that doesn’t work, Josephine’s next step is to embrace the enemy — but not really — and wait for the brash interloper’s inherent impatience to lead to disgusted resignation and departure.
Both of these gambits are ideal set-ups for physical slapstick, some of it laugh-out-loud hilarious: none better than Josephine’s efforts to school Penny in the arts of graceful movement and gymnastic stealth. Wilson gets ample mileage from her bull-in-a-china-shop antics, while Hathaway’s silent, long-suffering sighs and heavenward glances are to die for.
But Wilson too frequently draws from the Melissa McCarthy school of flouncing vulgarity, and too frequently employs her callipygian immensity as a tediously predictable weapon. Worse yet, Addison tolerates and even encourages such excess, holding several beats too long on tight close-ups of Wilson, while she mumbles and stumbles her way through a lame one-liner that doesn’t improve via repetition.
In a sense — and this is ironic — Wilson’s tacky boorishness drags the entire film down to Penny’s tawdry level, which is a serious miscalculation. The comedy works best when the disparate dynamic is retained in every respect, and Addison is too lazy (or sloppy) to consistently maintain that essential balance.
Happily, things improve during the story’s extended third act: the point at which the gloves come off, and Josephine and Penny agree to a There’s-Only-Room-For-One-Of-Us-In-This-Town competition. The challenge: to see who can be the first to swindle an unsuspecting mark of $500,000. The target: naïve tech billionaire Thomas Westerberg (Alex Sharp), who made his fortune with a hugely popular app dubbed “You’re Burnt.” (Think Snapchat, but with insults that vanish after 10 seconds.)
Westerberg has come to gamble away his money at the French Riviera, because — well — what else should one do with it?
Sharp is hilarious in his own right: Westerberg is an utterly hapless, tongue-tied nerd who hasn’t a clue how to behave in such grand surroundings. Sharp also excels at bump-into-it physical comedy; he has Steve Martin’s flair for creating escalating chaos while trying to correct a minor miscalculation.
In short, Westerberg couldn’t be a more perfect mark.
Hathaway has a lot of fun with Josephine’s various guises, with lavish outfits and dialects to match; she switches effortlessly from British to German and Australian accents, and speaks French, Dutch and even sign language. And there’s no question that Hathaway knows how to wear costume designer Emma Fryer’s sumptuously sleek dresses.
Wilson runs hot and cold. Her role in Josephine’s progressive “Lord of the Rings” scam — during their collaborative phase — runs way past its sell-by date, and the gag isn’t that funny to begin with. Indeed, it pushes this film past “reasonable” and well into “stupidly ludicrous.”
On the other hand, Wilson’s expressive face is one of her strongest assets, particularly when Penny reacts blandly to an arch put-down, or anticipates something gross with abject, wide-eyed terror.
Penny’s flair for spontaneous concealment also is one of the most ingenious sight gags I’ve seen in years.
Woodeson’s Albert is a stitch, in a mostly silent role. Oliver matches Hathaway for sophistication, but with a lethal undercurrent; when the clearly annoyed Brigitte suggests getting rid of Penny “the old-fashioned way,” we don’t doubt that she means it.
But despite its occasional charms and giggles, The Hustle isn’t likely to leave more than a faint ripple on the cinematic pond. It is, indeed, a paler copy of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which in turn lacked the freshness of Bedtime Story.
I also suspect, in our post-Ocean’s Elevenworld — not to mention television’s Hustle, Leverage and all manner of other heist franchises — that we, as viewers, have become too sophisticated to fall for this film’s tricks, switches and reverses.
Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it certainly does breed … well … familiarity.
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