Hustlers, the new, based-on-a-true-story character study of exotic dancers in New York City who decided to turn the tables on their wealthy, piggish Wall Street clientele, is two things, for sure.
One, it’s a tour-de-force for Jennifer Lopez, who has waited two decades for a role that showcases and allows all of her strengths, vulnerabilities and aged wisdom to shine. Seriously, not since U-Turn and Out of Sight in 1997 and 1998, respectively, has the actress been given a fully formed character that she can make her own.
And two, Hustlers is a scathing indictment of American excess, greed and ingenuity that leaves no participant unscathed.
Writer-director Lorene Scafaria sets her guns blazing on both the ethically-bankrupt financiers who nearly destroyed the U.S. economy, and on a group of ordinary, everyday women who saw an opportunity and took advantage of that greed to provide for their families.
Whether Hustlers is a comedy, a drama or an epic expose of capitalism gone awry a la Goodfellas or The Wolf of Wall Street, is debatable.
The film is based on journalist Jessica Pressler’s 2015 New York magazine report, “The Hustlers at Scores,” which detailed how a small group of dancers at an elite adult nightclub charged tens of thousands of dollars off credit cards they finagled from uber-wealthy clients, whom they correctly theorized would rather write-off the loss than come clean about how they got fleeced.
Hustlers is told from the perspective of Dorothy (Constance Wu), who uses the stage name Destiny, who goes to work for a bustling strip club in 2007 whose dancers include an over-the-top Cardi B and Lizzo.
Eventually, she meets Ramona (Lopez), the head matriarch at the club, who has been dancing long enough to know all the ins and outs of the business. Ramona takes Destiny under her tutelage and together they form a formidable team.
As the film jumps in time from 2007 to 2014 and then back to 2008, the day the stock market collapsed, Hustlers establishes its tricky narrative structure. It introduces Elizabeth (Julia Stiles), who is a reporter interviewing Destiny seven years after she first met Ramona, but viewers are never told what publication she works for and the interview/flashback trope doesn’t work as well here as in past films that used a similar approach.
Destiny gets pregnant and has a daughter, and by 2011, she is far removed from the dancer’s life but struggling to survive. Eventually she reconnects with Ramona and the two women, along with Mercedes (Keke Palmer) and Annabelle (Lili Reinhart), embark on a scheme to seduce men with a special concoction of Ketamine and MDMA that makes them happy enough to hand over their credit cards and fucked up enough to not remember clearly what happened.
Mercedes has a boyfriend who is facing prison time. Annabelle spontaneously vomits anytime she gets stressed. That’s about it for character development with such secondary roles.
As Hustlers progresses, you notice familiar beats. There’s a huge Christmas celebration where all the women gather to shower each other with lavish gifts and wax poetic about the importance of family. Then the business grows to the point that Destiny and Ramona need to outsource work, and they bring on new women eager to get rich quick. Eventually, a fissure develops between the two masterminds. And then, much like the economy, everything falls apart.
What Hustlers lacks in urgent originality, it compensates for by not pulling any punches about the state of our collective humanity post-financial collapse, and no one gets a pass.
It also posits an interesting theory: If society is really nothing more than a giant proverbial strip club, which side do you fall on? Are you a dancer, a client or some unscrupulous hybrid?
Ramona may be a compassionate soul, a dutiful mother and the stereotypical hooker with a gold heart, but she also doesn’t think twice about playing roulette with the well-being of the men they ensnare.
Destiny more than once makes it clear that she has no loyalty to anyone but herself.
For all its pretense about sisterhood and women looking after each other’s backs, Hustlers at its heart is a story about two sharks who eventually run out of ocean, run out of food and turn on each other without hesitation.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Sep 12-19, 2019.