Hustlers

Inspired by the viral New York Magazine article, Hustlers follows a crew of savvy former strip club employees who band together to turn the tables on their Wall Street clients.

"Hustlers, the new strippers-turned-scammers tragicomedy starring Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu, nurses a nostalgia all its own. Based on a New York magazine story about how the Great Recession inspired a pair of entrepreneurial dancers to concoct a ruthless “Robin Hood” scheme to steal back the money Wall Street plundered from the 99 percent, writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s film looks fondly to the mid-2000s, when stripping, at least for our protagonists, was absurdly lucrative and not-a-little glamorous. The post-2008 ploy that Ramona (Lopez) and Destiny (Wu) hatch—to spike customers’ drinks with a drug cocktail that would leave them incapacitated and their credit cards available to max out—was, just like that economy, never built to last. But what Ramona and Destiny eventually miss most is their friendship. Sometimes the deepest bonds are products of a time and place, too, and are stubbornly irretrievable thereafter.

Yes, I am arguing that the single best thing about Hustlers is the friends these criminals made along the way. It’s no matter that the real-life Ramona and Destiny were, reportedly, not as close as their movie counterparts. (Scafaria’s screenplay is stuffed with countless can’t-make-this-up details straight from the source material, but the closeness of Ramona and Destiny’s relationship appears to be invented.) Lopez and Wu suffuse their scenes with girlish glee as they forge a connection that ultimately underscores their womanly and maternal complexities. An immediate entrant into the pantheon of female friendship movies, Hustlers—a pretty much perfect film—makes plain the hollowness of so many other iterations of girl power in studio projects. You can feel its heart beat. 4/4*" - Slate