This week’s pick was a doozy, and that’s putting it lightly. I chose The Hustle (2019) for three reasons: I had never heard of this movie, I enjoy Anne Hathaway (usually) and Rebel Wilson (usually). I put “usually” in quotation marks, because this was not one of those times. I absolutely hated this movie. It may be in the running for worst or top three worst movies I have watched this year for this blog. Growing up, my dad would watch a lot of random movies. We had the Comcast Movie Channel package; he had his special chair in the den and would constantly spend Sunday afternoons watching random things, from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to whatever drivel had recently been released. One of his best quotes of all time was “it had some redeeming qualities!” This movie has none.

I’m going to start my review in the middle of the movie, because there is one scene that perfectly sums up the moronic mess that this movie is. Both girls are con artists living abroad in Europe, trying to find the next con to commit. They are at each other’s throats and decide that the next person to con someone out of half of a million dollars will get to stay in the region while the other one has to go back home to the states. The scene in question is when Penny (Rebel Wilson) is pretending to be “emotionally blind” aka blind due to trauma, not a physical cause. There is the third character, Tommy (Alex Sharp), who Penny is trying to scam for $500,000 for a procedure to cure her. Josephine (Anne Hathaway) catches wind of this con that Penny is attempting to commit and decides to play the role of the German doctor who can help with Penny’s ‘condition’. Josephine makes Penny do all sorts of dumb stuff, like run into a closed door, for example. The worst part that summarizes this entire movie perfectly is when Josephine decides to “test” her other senses with food. She takes a french fry and goes into the bathroom, dunks it in the toilet bowl and then feeds it to Penny. This is (I can only assume) done for comedic effect. But it was zero percent funny to me.

There are also random bits of slapstick humor in this movie, like when Penny slips and slides down the stairs/hallway and a giant vase falls on her. This again, for me, was another groan inducing scene. On top of all this, there are random fart jokes (from Rebel Wilson’s character only) which are more so cringe-inducing than anything else.

This movie is a remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) which itself is a remake of Bedtime Story (1964). One begins to wonder why remakes must be made, if they are just a cash grab attempt by the studios, if original ideas have long left the creative sphere, etc. Somehow, with a budget of $21 million, The Hustle made almost $100 million back at the box office worldwide. My dad, were he alive when this movie came out, would have contributed to this metric. I have not seen any of the “original” two movies that this one is a remake of. I do not know if they are just as moronic or hold up better. And to be honest, after watching this one, I do not really feel inclined to learn more about this story.

The characterization and acting in this movie are annoying. After Josephine and Penny each give half a million to Tommy, he swindles them and leaves on a private plane. In this scene, Josephine is screeching her head off at the plane, jumping, and punching the air. She looks completely psychotic, and not in a funny way, but more so in a sad way, like I genuinely felt bad for Anne Hathaway for having to act in that scene. 

One thing that set my expectations for this movie upon loading it up on Amazon Prime Video was seeing the blurb that included the Rotten Tomatoes score. A measly 13%. That set my expectations very low, and even then, I was still disappointed and annoyed having had to watch this one. 

As someone who grew up watching dumb comedies like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), Liar Liar (1997), or Zoolander (2001), I am a fan of a light, silly comedy. The jokes in The Hustle do not land, and feel so random and shoehorned in that they are endless jabs into a pit of despair. I honestly have nothing good to say about this movie. I hated every second of agony that I felt while being forced to watch it. My girlfriend also had a bad time. We thankfully ate good food and drank good beer while watching it, but even these outside factors weren’t enough of a saving grace to make this even 1% enjoyable.

I think I would rather rewatch Super Troopers 2 (2018), a film I gave a 0 to, again twice over than have to rewatch even one scene from The Hustle. As I said in my last review with Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), I began liking it less and less having to think it over again while writing the review, and I am definitely hating The Hustle the more I type my review for it. 

Terribly unfunny, unoriginal, unenjoyable movie with absolutely no redeeming qualities. The worst performance I’ve ever seen from both Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson. I hope that once I post this review, I never have to think about or discuss this movie ever again.

-0 mallards/5

-Seann

I would never disparage a film. The medium of film is amongst the most artistic of all media, and there’s many arguments for that claim – films are, by their definition, made by many people all working in tandem to accomplish the same goal, as opposed to a painting in which there’s one artist and creator. Additionally the medium of film is utterly limitless, and there’s no way we will ever run out of new movies to make. Each decision made in a film is important, and movies are truly the sum of their parts. There are so many minute details in a film that one can fill volumes and volumes of books devoted to a single movie, and in fact there are many books that do just that. Also, film is one of the most polarizing artistic mediums in terms of criticism; what one person loves, another may detest, and vice-versa. Film is truly one of the most wondrous, nebulous, and ambitious types of artistic endeavor a group of people can create, and because of all of these reasons, I would never, under any circumstances, insult a film’s every aspect, question its existence, or the sanity of the individuals involved. 

That being said,  In Time (2011) makes me come very close to doing those things. 

This was a movie that I was tangentially familiar with, mostly because the concept (people stop aging at 25 and their remaining time of life is a currency that can be exchanged for goods and services) seems ripe for the picking for things like YouTube shorts and TikTok reels. It’s the kind of “check out this idea” that has serious legs for those who partake of social media short form content, which is great. We’ve seen this across many different artistic domains, for example the average length of a song is significantly shorter than it was even a decade ago – why make a 4 minute song, when a TikTok video is only 12 seconds? Should artists and creators be catering to these types of short-form content platforms? That’s a different argument that is outside of the scope of this review. 

Unfortunately this idea is not really that interesting to me, personally, which puts a serious damper on the ‘coolness’ factor of the movie. Add on to this fact that the concept is inconsistently executed, the actual mechanics behind it are never fully explained and seem to change to suit whatever the main character (played by Justin ‘This is Going to Ruin the Tour’ Timberlake, another highly suspect choice) needs to happen at the time. The characters are not interesting, the acting is overall very poor (Cilian Murphy is fine-ish), the shots are uninteresting and at times very very distracting, the music is ridiculously loud (louder than the dialogue in some parts), the character motivations make no sense, the world itself makes very little sense, the pacing is horrible (the climax of the film is essentially in the 12th minute), the dialogue is cheesy and melodramatic, the set design sucks, there is a thinly-veiled Bonnie and Clyde theme going on (without any of the charm or skill of the original), and to top it all off, it doesn’t actually have an ending. 

It probably seems like that’s, realistically, almost all aspects of the film that are bad. And yes, that is true. This would usually be the part where I say “BUT…” and put in what I liked about this movie, BUT….there wasn’t really anything that came to mind. I know it’s a cliche at this point, but I really did like when it ended. I was glad I didn’t have to watch any more of it. At a runtime of 1 hour and 49 minutes, including credits, it was approaching the “too long” point after maybe 30 minutes. It was very benevolent of the production team to not drag this into a 2-hour ordeal. Perhaps they knew that subjecting audiences to any more torture might lead to them being put behind bars. Full disclosure: unlike usual reviews, in which I try to watch the movies at least twice, I only watched this one once – I do not honestly have it in me to watch this travesty a second time. Those of you who have read my Unfrosted (2024) review, which I gave a final score of .5 mallards, know that I was able to even watch that one twice.

I don’t even really have space in this review to get into some specific gripes I have with the movie, but suffice it to say that there are many issues with every stage of the conception, production, and release of this movie. The budget for this was $40million (I would make a movie twice as good for half of that much), and it grossed $174million. I’m honestly a bit flabbergasted that it quadrupled its budget. I guess maybe JT was a big star at this time or something? Why did so many people pay to see this movie? I can guarantee you that nobody paid to see it twice. I’m kind of surprised it didn’t ruin Cilian Murphy’s career too, although as mentioned earlier, he was okay-ish, which when compared to the quality of the rest of the movie, means he gets the award for best contributor. 

In Time (2011) has an incomprehensible score of 6.7 out of 10 on IMDB, a Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer score of 36% (also way too high), and a flat 3.0 out of 5 on Letterboxd. I can’t help but believe, deep in my heart of hearts, that these numbers are inflated somehow. The alternative is too soul-crushing to bear. To think that thousands of viewers watched this movie and the consensus is that it’s better than average makes me want to crawl into a hole and let my time run out. Nevertheless, I cannot give this movie a flat 0. A flat 0 will happen one day on the blog, but it is not today. As I said at the end of my Unfrosted review – I can, with great strain and difficulty, picture a film somehow being worse than this.

-0.5 mallards/5

-Maxwell