WARNING: This Review May Contain Spoilers
This is something I like to call a gender-swap remake, a little like Ghostbusters. Chris Addison has taken the original story, told it almost frame by frame, the only difference being that the lead characters are female instead of male (and about 20 minutes of run time). Let’s look at this in more detail…
The Main Characters
Both films follow a pair of con-artists, one looking to learn from the other and with any unconventional pairing, it doesn’t go quite right. In both films, the pairings are made up of a rich, upper class, English grifter (I wonder if, being English myself, I should take this as a compliment or not) and a middle class fraudster. Both Penny and Freddie, our middle class con artists, use sympathy to get their way with the opposite sex and take them for whatever they can. Lawrence and Josephine, however, actually differ to some extent on their style. Other than when he becomes Dr Schohausen, Lawrence always poses as royalty of an enslaved country, whereas as far as we know Josephine only uses this ploy as part of their ‘Lord of the Rings’ con. Instead, she plays the vulnerable, damsel in distress role because men just love to be the hero.
This is actually one of many examples where Addison has told the story in the same way, down to the characters meeting on a train and Lawrence/Josephine seeing Freddie/Penny at work and the pair ending up in the same carriage together. Josephine even tries to get rid of Penny in the same way as Lawrence tries to rid himself of Freddie.
Like Looking In A Mirror
I don’t want to keep going over how much The Hustle mirrors Dirty Rotten Scoundrels but it’s really hard to avoid. From beginning to end, the films are almost inseparable from each, which for me is extremely unfortunate. Josephine even uses the exact same metaphor to describe Penny as is used by Lawrence in the original film ‘A poacher who shoots at rabbits scares big game away’. There’s a chance, like Josephine using the name Janet at the beginning of the film, that is a deliberate homage to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels but when you take the film as a whole, I completely disagree.
Predictable Pay Off
If you’ve seen Dirty Rotten Scoundrels before, the ‘twist’ at the end of The Hustle is obvious to you. Of course ‘Medusa’ is male not female, because our lead characters have also changed gender. If I’m honest, I feel that it’s also a little tenuous. Lawrence is only ‘Medusa’ because his grandmother was before him.
A Taste of Something Different
Ok, I think I’ve insulted Chris Addison’s lack of originality enough, so let’s look at the minimal times The Hustle differs from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
Number 1 – when they agree to the bet to con money out of Janet, Freddie decides to put himself in a wheelchair. Penny on the other hand plays at being blind because she has discovered that Thomas’ grandmother was also blind. However, both of these are caused by a mental issue that afflicted them.
Number 2 – it is actually Penny who discovers that Thomas isn’t as rich as they originally believed whereas, in the original film, it is Lawrence that Janet has this conversation with. Yes, obviously it is all part of the ultimate end game but it’s still worth a mention.
Number 3 – Josephine is the one conned first, not Penny. In the original film, Freddie believes he is going to bed with Janet and has won the bet but when he is taking a shower, Janet takes his clothes and all his money, and leaves to con Lawrence. This is flipped on its head in The Hustle as Thomas fleeces Josephine first when she throws herself at him to win the bet, then steals from Penny as he’s leaving.
Unneeded Additional Scene
For me, it’s obvious that Lawrence, Freddie and Janet are going to work together on another con. So why could they have not left the ending of The Hustle in the same way – the three of them walking up the stairs together? Instead they decide to shoot a month in the future and show the audience what was already pretty obvious – but that might just be me that’s seeing it that way.
In conclusion
I really think, if Addison had made The Hustle in his own way instead of making it a frame-by-frame gender remake it would have been a much better film. Don’t get me wrong it has its moments – mainly Rebel Wilson disguising herself as a bin bag but hey, like I always say, I’m not here to tell you what to watch but I would highly recommend Dirty Rotten Scoundrels over The Hustle any day.
