The Hustle review – Anne Hathaway kills the comedy in dire scam caper
A gender-switch reboot of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels co-starring Rebel Wilson is catastrophically unfunny
Anne Hathaway detonates a megaton blast of pure unfunniness in this terrifying film. She leaves behind a mushroom cloud of anti-humour, reducing every laugh possibility to grey-white ash in a postapocalyptic landscape of horror and despair. If J Robert Oppenheimer had witnessed this, he might have staggered out of the cinema auditorium, subjected the foyer to his stricken thousand-yard stare, and murmured that Hathaway had become Death of Comedy, the destroyer of gags.
The Hustle is a gender-switch reboot of the Riviera caper Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), which starred Michael Caine as a smooth Brit swindling rich suckers in the south of France, and Steve Martin as his rackety American rival-slash-partner. Now it’s Hathaway playing Josephine, the scam maestro with the couture outfits and the supposedly posh “English” accent. (Surely she will be finally unmasked as American, and there will be a point to how annoyingly fake that voice is? Surely?) And Rebel Wilson does her level best as Lonnie, the wisecracking underdog grifter who shows up on Josephine’s Riviera turf, making it clear to this entitled princess of confidence trickery that she wants a slice of the action, too.