Following the financial crash of 2008, a group of New York strippers finds themselves out of work. With fewer Wall Street types coming in to spend money, there’s less revenue to go around. This hurts all of them, until Ramona, the chief moneymaker in their club, devises a daring scheme to get rich without dancing. The women will approach a businessman at a bar, spike his drink so that he passes out, take him to the strip club, and then, while he’s unconscious, max out his credit card. They assume that, even if the guy sees a big chunk of money missing from his bank account, he’ll be too embarrassed to admit that he spent it at a strip club. They’re correct, and, for a time, the scheme works. But, of course, as their operation gets bigger, Ramona gets more reckless, and eventually, the whole house of cards comes falling down.
Hustlers was one of my most anticipated films of this year. In addition to starring Constance Wu, and being a fact-based, female-driven crime thriller, I actually know someone who worked on this movie. The supremely talented actor and dancer Momoko Judy Abe (stage name Momo Judy Ave), who I spoke about in my Maniac review, served as Constance’s stand-in on the project. She even has a small role in the movie as another stripper at the club. In case you’re wondering, she’s dressed like this in the film, and appears in the final shot.
So it’s safe to say that I was excited to see this movie. And after I read the positive reviews, I became even more pumped. When I got out of the theater, however, I was… something else.
Just to be clear, this is not a bad movie. It’s too well-acted and competently shot for it to be that. The fact-based story is interesting, and the flick’s messages about female solidarity, sex workers trying to become financially independent, and the all-too lenient treatment that powerful men get when they do bad things are laudable. The problem is the storytelling and editing. This movie should be called montages because that’s what it’s full of. There’s “learning the ropes” montages, “drugging guys” montages, shopping montages, and at least five instances of people walking in slow motion in a straight line. And because most of these montages are just showing things we’ve already seen, and shot and edited the exact same way each time, the movie becomes very repetitive and winds up feeling padded out. Which brings me to the second big issue, the fact that there almost doesn’t seem to be enough story to justify a two-hour runtime. We really don’t know much of anything about these characters other than the most shallow details. One’s a single mother, one got kicked out by her parents, one has a boyfriend who’s in jail, etc. Constance Wu’s character, Destiny, is the most fully-fleshed out since we learn that, on top of having a child and an ailing grandmother to support, she was abandoned by her parents at an early age. Unfortunately, we don’t learn that information until over an hour in, long after we’ve been asked to care. The sense of repetition and padding is further exacerbated by a framing device wherein Constance Wu, in the present, explains past events to a reporter played by Julia Stiles. As such, we the audience know where the story is headed, and wind up wondering why it’s taking so long to get there when we’ve reached the fifth slow-mo walking sequence. There’s also a ton of characters, like a stripper played by Cardi B, and a woman whose boyfriend is jealous of all the guys she dances for, that get introduced, and then disappear from the story after the first act. They might as well have not been in the movie at all, that’s how little impact they make.
In the end, I want to recommend Hustlers for its messages, its performances, the fact that it’s written and directed by a woman, and that it has one of my friend’s in it. At the same time, though, I didn’t love it and probably won’t see it again. I want it to do well for all the reasons I listed above. I just hope that, in the future, everyone involved in this project will go on to do something better.
liusviews 