THE REBEL WITHOUT A CLUE . . .
These ‘comedy’ con-artists make a truly dire double act — and cinemagoers are the ones being fleeced
The Hustle (12A) Verdict: Don’t be duped Detective Pikachu (PG) Verdict: Family fun
THE trailer for The Hustle, about a pair of female con-artists played by Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson, has been running in cinemas for a few weeks now. Every time I’ve seen it, I’ve looked forward less and less to watching the film. Occasionally, trailers these days still do what they’re meant to, and make you actually want to see the movie. But, more and more, they seem to fall into two other categories.
There’s the trailer that gives so much away that you think, why fork out on an outing to the cinema when the entire story has been so neatly digested for you?
Then there’s the category into which The Hustle falls, which makes you ask: if those are truly the best bits, the moments intended to entice us to our local multiplex, then what must the rest of the blessed film be like? The answer, in this case, is pure cinematic bilge.
Even if you happen to think that Wilson is the funniest comic actress in the world, and love the boorish, accident- prone, fat- girl persona that she peddles so relentlessly, you might feel duped out of your ticket money.
My own feeling, ventured more than once before, is that a little Rebel goes a long way. But in The Hustle, which she also co-produced, there’s a great deal of her, stretching her onenote act well beyond its natural tolerance point.
Hathaway is her comic foil, the Little to her Large. Even the retro, Sixtiesstyle, animated opening credits try to milk the physical differences between the pair. That’s fair enough, not that Wilson and Hathaway will ever trouble Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello or, indeed, even Syd and Eddie in the double-act rankings.
We know from pictures such as The Intern and Ocean’s 8, that Hathaway is a deft comedy performer, but she’s not among the handful of stars with an ability to outshine the material they’re given.
The cut-glass British accent she affects for most of the film might be designed to give her character a veneer of class, but it doesn’t, alas, do
the same for the film. Like the infinitely superior Ocean’s 8, The Hustle is a feminised reworking of a film with male protagonists, in this instance, the 1988 Michael Caine-Steve Martin vehicle Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which was itself a remake of Bedtime Story (1964), starring Marlon Brando and David Niven.
All those years ago, in Bedtime Story, Niven played an elegant English swindler plying his trade in the fictional Cote d’Azur resort of Beaumont-surMer. That’s Hathaway’s role.
She plays Jo (the name perhaps intended as a nod to Joanna Lumley, whose accent Hathaway has admitted she is trying to mimic), who has a
lucrative con going in the Beaumont casino, using her beauty to prey on vain, gullible millionaires.
Then, on a train, she encounters Penny (Wilson), a loud, uncouth Australian who scams men into funding the search for her sister, who has been abducted — so she tells them — and sold into sex slavery.
The last thing Jo wants is for Penny to muscle in on her patch, so she does her best to stop her, but then realises it might be easier to train her up and work as a team. Jo duly tries to teach Penny how to force a tear to trickle down her cheek, the better to appear fragile and vulnerable. Penny gurns furiously in a vain attempt to find the elusive tear. ‘Are you constipated?’ asks Jo.
This is what passes for comedy in The Hustle, which is scripted by Jac Schaeffer, and has none of the wit and sophistication of, let’s say, carry On Matron.
Soon, however, Jo realises that she doesn’t want Penny as an accomplice. ‘There isn’t room for both of us in Beaumont-sur-Mer,’ she says, prompting those of us suffering in the audience to conclude that it’s a shame there’s room for either of them.
Anyway, she proposes a ‘con-off’, a competition to see who can be the first to fleece a naive young tech billionaire (Alex Sharp) of $500,000. The loser must leave town.
A series of less-than-hilarious set-pieces ensue, followed by a twist that almost nobody in the audience under the age of 11 will see coming.
What is a surprise, though, is that the first-time director of this rubbish is the engaging British comedian chris Addison, whose TV credits as a comic actor include the wonderfully scabrous political satire The Thick Of It.
Surely he knows what’s funny and what isn’t? Still, if he’s the man responsible for keeping the running-time down to 94 minutes, then he’s at least done us one favour, despite a very worrying hint that a sequel might be on the cards. n Detective Pikachu is altogether more fun, however cynical it might seem to try to cash in on the Pokémon craze, now the first generation of addicts to the multimedia monster franchise are becoming parents themselves.
PIKAcHU
is a cute, wisecracking ball of yellow fur voiced by Ryan Reynolds, although nobody except an orphaned teenager called Tim ( Justice Smith) can understand him.
Together, in a lively pastiche of film noir, they investigate the apparent death of Tim’s father in Ryme city, a metropolis where humans and Pokémon creatures live in harmony.
A media baron played by Bill nighy seems to have something to do with the mystery, and a pretty intern (Kathryn newton), working for his thinly- disguised TV company cnM, helps Tim to solve it.
Writer-director Rob Letterman (Shark Tale, Goosebumps) lets it all get decidedly weird, but there are a few great lines (all delivered by Reynolds), and some terrific computer-generated effects.
Solid family fun.