Hustlers (2019)
(Amazon Streaming, December 2020) Welcome to the 2020s! Your new moral orthodoxy, and you don’t get to choose to accept it, is that drugging, robbing and possibly abusing people is perfectly fine as long as they’re men and you pre-emptively declare yourself the victim! Wait, what? Well, yes: While it’s absurdly reductive to see Hustlers through the lens of reactionary misandry, there’s also a lot of that in the film. Adapted from an article about real NYC strippers drugging and robbing Wall Street types, the film does become more potent as a class-war kind of screed. It does have the (belated) decency to recognize that its heroines may not be completely righteous – that once you successfully target the deserving, it’s much easier to hurt the undeserving. Fortunately, some top talent goes into the execution: written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, the film assembles an all-star cast of actors-singers like Jennifer Lopez, Constance Wu, Julia Stiles, Keke Palmer, Lizzo and Cardi B (who once said she drugged and robbed clients of their money during her early years as a stripper – role model, wooo). Nearly everyone does great work, with special attention paid to a great performance from Lopez, who hits upon a number of her personal strengths to create her character. The execution of Hustlers is a great deal better than its somewhat problematic premise, in between what could have been male exploitation of a salacious topic, on the one hand, or unrepentant man-bashing on the other. Having never been a stripper nor a strip-club patron in the past, I’m clearly not in the target audience for this film, but even I could appreciate the better moments of the film when it gets cracking on the atmosphere, the characterization and the dark irony inherent in its Robin Hood(ick) premise. Maybe it’ll go down more easily on a second viewing.