HUSTLERS – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

It’s GoodFellas, except they’re gals. No, really. This based-on-fact drama — inspired by a New York article by Jessica Pressler that you can read online — about New York City strippers who conned their clients out of lots of money is wonderfully redolent of Scorsese’s mafia masterpiece in both style and substance: the seductiveness of easy money, the giddiness of getting away with a perfect crime… the arrogance and the rashness and the greed that eventually leads to it all falling apart. It’s a cinematic bonbon of delinquent deliciousness.

But wait! Hustlers is also a sort of thematic sequel to The Big Short, 2015’s real-life satire on the 2008 Wall Street crash. (This one is also from Big Short producers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay.) The men targeted by our avenging protagonists are Wall Streeters, the assholes who crashed the economy in 2008, a few years before the bulk of events depicted here, and who suffered not one tiny consequence for that: they didn’t go to prison; they kept all their ill-gotten riches. “The game” that is the American economy “is rigged,” rages veteran stripper Ramona (Jennifer Lopez, in the performance of her career) as she woos her one-time protégé Destiny (Constance Wu, absolutely riveting) into the scam, “and it does not reward people who play by the rules.” So why should they play by the rules? Especially now that they are newly desperate precisely because of the financial havoc these men themselves wrought? Continue reading…