The Hus­tle

Sun, sand, surf – and saps. They all make the idyl­lic French Riv­iera a per­fect hunt­ing ground for scam­mers, and a high­ly agree­able set­ting for a movie. The 1988 bud­dy com­e­dy Dirty Rot­ten Scoundrels under­stood this, treat­ing a fizzy com­e­dy about rival con artists (Michael Caine was a smooth oper­a­tor, Steve Mar­tin a walk­ing calami­ty) like a sight­see­ing vaca­tion along the Cote d’Azur.

Chris Addison’s remake, The Hus­tle, rotates on the same axis of lux­u­ry, falling back on the mate­r­i­al plea­sures of breath­tak­ing beach­front vis­tas, Djan­go Rein­hardt-style gui­tar pick­ing, and haute cou­ture too expen­sive for we com­mon­ers to even breathe on. But because the cul­tur­al con­di­tions of our present moment can’t allow for a movie about men out­smart­ing women, the remake gets a hook from gen­der-flipped cast­ing that has distaff swindlers hood­wink­ing male marks.

Anne Hath­away, inhab­it­ing the Caine role with a full arse­nal of accents, deliv­ers a mono­logue to her boor­ish charge Rebel Wil­son that this must be the nat­ur­al state of things; a man under­es­ti­mates a woman’s intel­li­gence, and he is accord­ing­ly left vul­ner­a­ble to manip­u­la­tions sweet­ened by fem­i­nine wiles.

Any­one who’s seen the orig­i­nal film will be able to track each twist and rever­sal of for­tune beat by beat, and more press­ing­ly, they’ll imme­di­ate­ly recog­nise the issues unavoid­able in this fem­i­nist revi­sion­ism. Dirty Rot­ten Scoundrels (and its fore­bear, the 1964 Mar­lon Bran­do-David Niv­en pic­ture Bed­time Sto­ry) ulti­mate­ly had its last laugh at the expense of its chau­vin­ist leads, both of them tak­en for a ride by an anony­mous grifter lat­er revealed to be the woman they’re attempt­ing to woo.

Addi­son does the same thing, and the after­taste has a bit­ter­er tang to it when the film ends with a man using emo­tion­al sub­terfuge to out­smart two women. The film knows this much, and tries to soft-ped­al it by reveal­ing that this guy only got one over on the gals by using lessons he learned from his grand­moth­er. In prac­tice, this just adds a super­flu­ous com­pli­ca­tion to a con­cept already bor­der­ing on convolution.

Set­ting aside the mud­dled you-go-girl eth­ic leaves lit­tle more than the two lead per­for­mances, the absence of recog­nis­able faces in sup­port­ing roles almost glar­ing in a well-fund­ed stu­dio project. Hathaway’s hav­ing plen­ty of fun toy­ing with the con­cept of ​“Anne Hath­away,” play­ing her queen fraud­ster as a riff on her always-on, per­pet­u­al­ly per­for­ma­tive pub­lic image. When she shows Wil­son how to cry on com­mand, trem­bly lip and all, she’s meta­tex­tu­al­ly pop­ping the hood on her Oscar-win­ning per­for­mance in Les Miserables.

Wil­son plays a ver­sion of her­self too, but it’s an unflat­ter­ing car­i­ca­ture. What­ev­er oxy­gen her char­ac­ter doesn’t use up talk­ing about food and her pas­sion for eat­ing, she spends on sex­u­al propo­si­tions to men repulsed by her body. Though Wilson’s on-screen per­sona began as a cut­ting rejoin­der to ​‘fat­ty fall down go boom’ prat­fall humour, each new role moves her clos­er to being the pre­cise thing she once defied.

A poor­ly thought through script brings trou­ble to par­adise, nev­er­the­less a nice space to inhab­it for 94 brief min­utes. It works as a trav­el­ogue – and like the James Bond pic­tures, that is basi­cal­ly what this film needs to be – and yet not as the zip­py duel of capers from which it is descend­ed. One gets the impres­sion that Hathaway’s char­ac­ter would be a mar­vel­lous vaca­tion com­pan­ion, the two of them bet­ter suit­ed to leisure than their own work.