There’s a slew of movies mitigating the fallout from 2008’s Global Financial Crisis; Hustlers tells the tale of a group of former-strippers who turn to fleecing their former clients. Since the market crash strip clubs have felt the blow back; there are less Wall Street guys and they aren’t loosely spending their money like they used to. Ramona, played by Jennifer Lopez, comes up with a hustle to meet guys in bars and take them back to the club with the hope of maximising their credit cards. She soon turns to drugging them to assure they be more compliant. The movie follows Destiny (Constance Wu) as she begins her career as a stripper, gets taken under the wing of Ramona, and eventually becomes second-in-charge of the operation.
I loved this movie when watching the girls build their craft. At first, they are strippers – Ramona, Destiny and a couple of the other girls talk about the art of stripping, and the best ways to coerce a client to spend their money. One stripper, played by Cardi B, has a great technique when it comes to grinding a man’s leg; you go slow, because it’s better to “…milk the clock, and not the cock.” Some of the women working as strippers have boyfriends, and children. They have a fairly supportive network between themselves and since I’m not someone who would ever go to a strip club or be backstage, I liked listening to the girls if only for that brief time. Then when the girls move to drugging their former clients, they have to work through a few problems, be it keeping the guys interested, picking the right mark, deciding to drug them and working out the dose. The scene with Gary collapsing in the club’s private room is hilarious.
I think this movie has a fantastic attitude towards subtly conveying to us how the girls interact within ‘a man’s world’. There’s an unavoidable level of sleaziness the girls have to endure working in a strip club, but the girls have their ways of playing the males who think they’ve got the club run on their terms. I loved little moments, like when we hear Wu’s character get called over as “Lucy Lou!” – just a metaphor for “hot Asian chick” at the time. The client that gets shouted a lap-dance is more engaged in joking with his friends that with the girl in front of him. The owners of the club expect tips for nothing. And even as Destiny rides home on the bus we hear on the radio that the hosts are degrading some celebrity housewife for getting a cut in a divorce. Their world is all set up to be a hustle, before they even have to get their hands dirty.
I also found Hustlers to be pretty funny, especially around the middle, which was a good time for the movie to elevate on top of what it was already giving me. I’m hearing Lopez in conversations for the awards come the end of the year, and she is pretty great. Wu also gives an earnest performance after her main role in the uber successful Crazy Rich Asians last year. And from the few episodes I’ve seen of her TV sitcom Fresh Off the Boat I like her a lot and I’m glad she’s doing well.
Lastly, I think the musical choices are really good – most of them are just R&B songs and hits from the last decade but they helped give the sense of time, also considering the way the movie is quick to remind us what year we are in, from 2017 up to 2015. I’ve never enjoyed Britney Spears’ “Give Me More” but this movie made me like it even for a little bit. I did think it would have been funny if Jennifer Lopez’s character turned on the radio and started getting down to “Get Right” or something like that; it would have been on the nose but why not? (No, it was a good choice that they didn’t).
The only small criticisms I have would come through the ending. I found the fallout between Ramona and Destiny to come out of nowhere. Ramona starts to get lazy, as if blinded by how much money they can make, but we never see a gradual breakdown to this relationship; we are just told it happened and then we see it’s it. Destiny and Ramona became friends rather rapidly, which is fine; sometimes people just click and there’s no way to explain it, but the movie puts big weight in how good of friends they were at the end, closing the movie out rather emotionally… I wasn’t feeling it. I wouldn’t say Hustlers is an emotional movie. I think for the most part the movie is happy enough to rely on the strength of the plot, so then for it to be soppy at the end came out of left field. The story is also told in flashbacks with scenes between Wu and Julia Styles, who plays a reporter interviewing Destiny at her house, and these scenes are thrown in intermittently. They are distracting and don’t ultimately culminate until the very end. I did like how Style’s character told Destiny that she should call Ramona and mend their relationship.
In the end I really liked Hustlers. It reminded me of recent films like I, Tonya and War Dogs, where some average joes see an opportunity to do something seedy for the betterment of their lives; it reminds me of I, Tonya especially due to the way Destiny gets to reflect on her actions through the interview after the fact. I think this is one of the best movies of the year – big fan.
4.5
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