First thing first, garnering hefty Oscar buzz aiming for BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE trophy, Jennifer Lopez cunningly capitalizes on the Academy's time-tested proclivity of category fraud, as it is in evidence, her Ramona Vega, a veteran stripper-turned-felony is the co-lead in the third feature film of woman writer/director Lorene Scafaria.
Hot on the heels of Hollywood major studios' corrective measures in the wake of the ongoing MeToo Movement, which foregrounds the box office appeal of sororal solidarity (OCEAN'S EIGHT, WIDOWS, etc.), HUSTLERS blatantly flaunts its male-gaze factor by telling the story of a posse of female strippers and kick-starts its narrative with the erotic pageantry of their strutting and sashaying voluptuousness and money-procuring flirtation. Edging towards the age of 50, Lopez is the veritable stunner in her pole-dancing entry bravado, but that's almost all she wrote relative to the toxic male gaze.
Engineering as an interview of former stripper Destiny (Wu) by journalist Elizabeth (Stiles, ever so stuffy), HUSTLERS chronically examines Destiny's complicated relationship with her mentor Ramona initiated in 2007 when they both work in the NYC stripper club Moves, but less is transparent why Ramona takes Destiny under her wings in the first place, any sapphic transgression is meticulously erased from both parties, they are at best partners-in-crime, “doesn't money make you horny?” is the only sexy talk we can get .
After the subsequent financial crisis thinning out the clientele, Destiny tentatively drops her line of business and starts a family, when that turns out to be a disaster, she reunites with Ramona and her other two protégés, Mercedes (Palmer, crackling with alacrity) and a barfing-prone Annabelle (Reinhart), together the quartet concocts a scheme to max out the credit card of their Wall Street clients by drugging them insensate, so that, they can hardly recollect what happens the night before and dare not go to the police to admit their sordid goings-on.
Sooner or later, their lucrative business runs out of gas due to unreliable new addition, mounting internecine strife and Ramona's ill-advised decision to hive off their deal from the stripper club, consequences finally catch up with them, and Destiny, ignobly turns out to be a fair-weather friend (yes, blame it on the kid, motherhood is a mental illness), which compounds our ambivalence of our protagonist and tips the scale towards Ramona's motherly affection that rounds out this sober but workmanlike dissertation of capitalism's underbelly.
Cramming zeitgeist ear-worms into its chronically arranged plot development (Usher has a cameo to re-enact the glory in his heyday), HUSTLERS triumphantly milks audience's nostalgia to great extent, and proffers another leading role for Asian-American rising star Constance Wu, who ripens into a more world-savvy role that attests her chops (her seething angst of juggling both motherhood and career hustler after frantically fielding an unexpected accident is the highlight), but one can easily see why Lopez, embodying both preternaturally age-defying lissomness and emotional candidness, is raved for her career-best outing, finally, not just a famous-for-being-famous celebrity in the Oscar ceremony, she can actually vie for the highest reword as an actress, that is the life-affirming story the Academy members find pretty hard to resist.
referential entries: Gary Ross' OCEAN'S EIGHT (2018, 6.1/10); Steve McQueen's WIDOWS (2018, 7.6/10); Steven Soderbergh's MAGIC MIKE (2012, 7.2/10).
View more about Hustlers reviews
