Shoutout to the two creepy, perverts who sat behind me cheering, clapping and…moaning…every time J-Lo or Cardi B appeared on screen in stripper outfits. Yucky, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck!
One of the unfunniest, discount-Aaron-Sorkin-ish looking movies of the year—based on solely the trailers alone—Hustlers, where a bunch of mostly—(I SAID MOSTLY)—amateur actresses—85% of them musicians, 10% of them legitimate professionals, and 5% of them a frightened-to-death Julia Styles—rodeo though the life of an exotic dancer while discovering nimble, little routes to profit off of Wall Street clients, turns out to be a slightly above humdrum experience? Whaaat???
People are saying Hustlers is like the female-lead version of Wolf of Wall Street that alternatively centers around strippers Wolf of Wall Streeting Wolf of Wall Streeters. Personally, I sort of like to interpret it as if a discount Social Network meet the Big Short, and then moderately came into contact with Showgirls. Sounds groovy, right?
When it comes down to it, be that as it may, Hustlers does scrape the bare minimum of its potential in a majority of areas by simply presenting the facts and only the facts as robotically as robotically possible—done in a very robotically “fashionable” pizazz, however. It’s all hammered together tightly enough to pass as a decent biopic of the crazed “based-on-a-true-story,” but the film has almost nothing else going for it besides choppily exploiting the “hustles.” Majestic directing and a truthful adaptation of the (possibly untruthful) article can’t shield the fact that the motion picture simply craves to hurtle through all the events as redundantly and depthless as possible. Hustlers, in the end, kind of drags because of this.
At least, more than anything though, I’m just impressed that a movie somehow caused me to relatively admire a group of female individuals who done-did some, frankly, morally unethical, illegal-type activities. But hey, tough times call for tough decisions sometimes.
Verdict: C+
“Hustlers” is now playing in theaters.
Burning the Celluloid 
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