Hustlers review: Strippers, drugs and JLo

The movie starts in 2007 and follows the story of Dorothy (Crazy Rich Asians’ Constance Wu), a woman who turns to stripping to pay her bills and take care of her grandmother. She is beautiful, but can’t really dance and doesn’t really know how to manipulate men into parting with their cash.

That is where Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) comes in. We’re introduced to her with a pole dance number set to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal,” a song which should have a much better strip club presence. Ramona is the skilled veteran who knows every move on a pole and on a customer’s lap. She takes a liking to Dorothy and offers to partner up in an effort to help Dorothy make more money.

Soon, they are both taking home stacks of bills every night. Everything is taken care of. The club is thriving and so are they. Then the 2008 recession hits. It is an interesting turn in the plot of the movie. Not only does it get us to the more interesting parts of this story, but it also paints a picture of the trickle down effect that crash had. When you are a stripper at a club just off of Wall Street, it makes sense that business dries up when the market bottoms out.

The club survives, but most of the dancers go their own way. That is when Ramona and two former dancers (played respectively by Star’s Keke Palmer and Riverdale’s Lili Reinhart) come up with a plan to use MDMA and Ketamine as a sort of mind-erasing happy drug. They won’t be strippers anymore. They will be party girls, promoters that get men mind-altered drunk and convince them to spend like high rollers at a strip club. The girls and the club split the overall bill 50/50. Dorothy is eventually roped into the scheme as well and we have a crime family made up exclusively of sexy women.

I have to give credit to director and screenwriter Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers is legitimately funny and most of the humor comes from the script zagging right when it seemed like it was zigging too hard into taking itself seriously. There is a scene featuring Dorothy and Ramona testing their product that in an instant goes from eye-roll inducing to hilarious.

The script is also pretty complex. If you have friends or a significant other put off by the idea of going to see a movie about strippers, know that this isn’t Showgirls or even Striptease. At times, Hustlers feels like A Chorus Line. The “oh I hope I’m good enough” nature of those kinds of stories gives way to something akin to 2018’s Widows as we get into the crime spree at the heart of the story. There are even times when it feels like Hustlers is parodying that sketch Lisa Kudrow did at the MTV Movie Awards where the premise was every 90s girl power movie had to feature a scene where multiple women danced around in a kitchen while lip-syncing into a spatula. You should look this up. It was brilliant.

Overall the cast is strong. The only one I wasn’t all in on was Wu in the lead role. It’s not that she was bad by any means. I am just not sure when we decided the mom from Fresh Off the Boat was the wide-eyed innocent through which the audience would see every story Hollywood wanted to tell. I feel like there was a better choice there.

Hustlers is a pretty ideal September movie for a lot of reasons. First, crime capers are always fun. Second, the victims in this movies are all of the jerks that treated these women like garbage when they were strippers, so the revenge fantasy is alive and well. Finally, this is like a perfect comeback vehicle for Lopez. Sure, she has gotten work in recent years, but all of her projects have been stuff like her cop show Shades of Blue or last year’s Second Act with Leah Remini. They’re the kind of things that are fine, I guess, but really who cares? You forget about them the second you turn them off.

Hustlers checks every box you want. It’s fun, it’s funny, and it might very well be Jennifer Lopez’s best role since she was locked in a trunk with George Clooney.