The Hustle has been giving me the hard sell

A couple weeks back I wrote about how I’ve missed seeing and ranking Glass, because everywhere I’ve looked to see a reasonably priced version of it, I haven’t found it.

It’s been the opposite with The Hustle, the female remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. I kind of decided I wasn’t going to watch it, but it’s been throwing itself at me.

I could have seen it for free, of course, when it was in the theater, as my critics card allows me to do that. But, like Glass, it didn’t rise to a sufficient level of importance for me back then, possibly because Rebel Wilson is hit or miss for me, and I’d just missed bigtime with her with Isn’t it Romantic? I’m sure there were also two other films released that week that I wanted to see.

But I got another free opportunity on the plane, or possibly on multiple plane trips, as I made two trips to America this year. I know it was definitely available on the second trip, because I swiped past it. “Nah,” I thought in dismissing it.

The point where I really had to stick to my guns about not seeing it was when it came up on iTunes as the 99 cent rental the beginning of last week. Usually I’ll just automatically click to rent most films that are available for 99 cents and count toward the current ranking year. However, in late December, the available viewing time slots are more important than just seeing whatever I can get my hands on. Pass, again.

Fast forward to New Year’s Day in the evening, when my wife and I were looking for something lighter to watch after the previous night’s Midsommar. I thought maybe it was finally time to yield to The Hustle, and noticed that it was still available for 99 cents on iTunes, even though the 99 cent rental of the week had moved on to Anna (which I am also shunning).

When I floated the idea to her, though, I was secretly sort of glad that she rejected it, citing similar concerns about Rebel Wilson. I’d decided I wasn’t going to watch this movie, and it feels good to honor your original instinct.

But then a half-dozen other ideas were tossed out and kind of mutually rejected as not quite the right way to wrap up a day at the beach for my youngest son’s birthday, when we wanted something that was just easy on the mind. And when we went on to Stan, our Australian streaming service, The Hustle delivered its final pitch, showing up there for free.

The universe was telling us to watch The Hustle, so we did.

And I’m glad we did. I got a lot of laughs out of it, most of which were provided by Wilson, and most of those through line deliveries rather than pratfalls, upending our biases against her in multiple ways. My wife felt similarly. My only issue was that it petered out into what felt like an anticlimax, such that seeing the words “THE END” on the screen caused me to sit up in surprise.

As it turns out, The Hustle hustled me. It made me forget some of the key plot details of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, whose structure it follows almost to a T, only with the genders reversed. Not only should that have prepared me for that ending, but it also should have prepared me for the reversal that immediately precedes that ending, which I somehow forgot.

SPOILERS

I think the reason the ending struck me as surprising is that the gender reversal fails in its adherence to modern gender politics. Whereas Glenne Headley gets the last laugh in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, making it a little slice of feminism even back in the late 1980s, it’s Alex Sharp’s would be mark (who is actually a con man himself) who gets the last laugh here, making fools of Wilson and Anne Hathaway. The three do join forces at the end, which is the same ending as Scoundrels, but our current era usually requires women to ultimately leave the men as fools, rather than vice versa. I guess you can’t really have your cake and eat it too, with the women both co-starring in a Scoundrels remake and being the ultimate “winners” of such a remake.

It’s no Hustlers, but I’m glad I saw The Hustle, and am in the position to give Rebel Wilson the benefit of the doubt next time. That’s probably just as well, given that she’s Australian, and I want to support the people who are on “our team.”