J-Lo takes pole position in a perfect hen night film
Hustlers (15) Verdict: A story of naked greed ★★★✩✩ AFTER her prolific early career, Jennifer Lopez doesn’t appear in many films these days. But this is not the week to observe that we don’t see much of her, because in Hustlers we see most of her.
It is a film inspired by a true story, about a bunch of stripper/prostitutes who prey on wealthy customers, drugging the men and fraudulently using their credit cards.
Lopez is terrific, and while I can’t claim to be an expert, it’s hard to imagine even a professional poledancer looking more at ease astride a pole.
She plays Ramona, an experienced stripper who acts as mentor to newcomer Destiny (Constance Wu), and teaches her all the pole moves — the stag, the reverse stag, the scissor-sit, the half-nelson, or maybe I’m beginning to think back to ITV’s Saturday-afternoon wrestling. At any rate, there’s quite a repertoire.
The story pings between 2007 and 2014, when a journalist (Julia Stiles) piecing the story together interviews all the protagonists.
Following the 2008 financial crash, pole-dancers suffer a direct hit; the Wall Street bankers don’t flash the cash like they used to.
So Ramona thinks, why don’t the strippers start stripping the assets of bankers who still like to party, and who, after all, were responsible for the mess everyone’s in?
They begin spiking men’s drinks with a cocktail of ketamine and MDMA, two drugs which together make the victims woozily incapable of protecting their pin numbers.
We see this happening a lot, which is where the narrative suffers. This is not a sophisticated scam and the film is not The Sting, or American Hustle, or even Ocean’s Eight. It’s simply lots of sleazy men being taken for a sleazy ride.
Writer-director Lorene Scafaria does her best not to make the women look sleazy, too — they’re just trying to earn a buck to support their grannies, kids, themselves — but with limited success. Nor can she stop Hustlers getting rather tiresomely repetitive.
She tries to jolly things up with a lively soundtrack and other devices such as slow-motion, but not even a slow-mo J-Lo can quite overcome the paucity of the plot.
Still, among the largely female audience at the screening I attended, it went down great guns. It would make the perfect hen party film — unless the stags are out on the same night, heading for a strip joint.