j* Movie Reviews 2019

The Hustle (2019)

Funny, goofball and all the Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson your heart desires.

I've never knowingly seen Dirty Rotten Scoundrels upon which this is based or remade, so I went in without any real preconceptions. And it is a really fun film. It goes hard into a lot of really delightfully silly spaces. So silly. Theatrically and hilariously silly. You get the tone. It's a silly, silly film and it doesn't care.

And you know what, silly can be a whole lot of fun! Hathaway is glorious, as she always is, and in this she gets to do a lot of hilarious things that really seemed to extend her facially, a whole range of emotion from doe-eyed beauty, to angry, to controlling. Wilson is, well, Wilson and she's as great as ever. My mate and I talked about the fact that probably as Australians we don't really fully appreciate Rebel, in the same way we never could fully appreciate Steve Irwin, because Australians all know someone a bit like that. And she really is hilarious and pushing the bogan-pride as far as ever.

The two of them together are a delightful odd couple. The interplay between them is wonderful, and I was quite excited to see the whole deep theatrical side of Rebel during the "Lord of the Rings" sequence. You should be prepared to see some really weird stuff. The gazillionaire who shows up towards the end is also amazing - as a tech-guy he just looks so familiar and it really did feel like they managed to fuse Tom from Myspace with the Zuckerberg. It was pretty impressive.

There were a lot of laughs, some clever, some goofy, some grotty and some hard to define. If you like funny things, then this is one.

J* gives it 4 stars