There is nothing Biblical about saying that women are the “weaker” sex.  The Bible does talk at length about the differences between females and males, which is a part of God’s design.  However, saying that one is better than the other because one is supposedly physically stronger, or the other is stereotypically empathetic, is insupportable.  There are female bodybuilders and male mental health professionals.  A lot of what I am alluding to has to do with sexuality, and therein lies another problem with our culture.  Today’s film, The Hustle (2019), does not talk about these ideas in a Christian context.  Yet, they underscore a lot of the absurdities behind these thoughts through the behaviors of the main characters and why they do what they do.  I cannot say any of this is a great revelation, but the movie mostly works.

Penny “Penn” Rust’s (Rebel Wilson) work is just what a title like The Hustle might suggest: tricking men out of their money.  Our first encounter of her is in a bar in the United States.  She meets a man named Todd (Rob Delaney), who she found on a dating profile.  When she shows up not looking like the slim profile picture, she claims she is here to vet him for her sister, who is the actual person with whom he fell in love.  She starts making up more stories about this sibling, taking advantage of his predilection for synthetic beauty and wanting to pay for it.  Before she can get any money out of him, the police get to the scene and she is forced to flee.  We then shift to Beaumont-Sur-Mer on the French Riviera where Josephine “Jo” Chesterfield (Anne Hathaway) is doing the same thing.  She is posing as a clueless American girl, whose mark, a hopeless gambler named Matthias (Casper Christensen), is trying to charm her.  He offers an expensive, bejeweled bracelet to her before Brigette Desjardins (Ingrid Oliver), playing the part of a police detective, comes to take her away.  They return a fake of the jewelry to Matthias before Jo is escorted out, supposedly arrested.  Brigitte and Jo are working together, and they congratulate themselves on their latest prize.  We then shift to a European train where, in the dining car, Penn enters to have a meal.  She sits down across from a stranger and begins to con a meal out of him.  A few seats down is Jo, and she observes Penn’s actions with interest.  The also happen to share a cabin for the rest of the trip.  As they ride along, Penn lets on that she is a con woman.  Not wanting to have any competition in Beaumont-Sur-Mer, Jo innocently suggests that Penn go on to the next town.  When next Jo is talking with Brigitte about the next target, Penn pulls up with the person they are about to target.  Jo is not happy about this development and arranges to have Penn arrested.  It is Brigitte who incarcerates Penn, but the latter is able to barely give Jo’s name as someone who could vouch for the criminal.  Upon getting to the so-called jail, Jo offers to pay for Penn to fly out of the country in order to avoid the wrath of the man she had conned.  While on the flight, she meets Matthias.  Between him and everything else that has happened in the last few days, Penn has realized that Jo is a con woman just like her, if much more well off.  Just when Jo thinks she has her peace, Penn intrudes on the seaside mansion wanting to learn more tricks of the trade.  Jo’s initial reaction is refusal, but Penn threatens to go to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL).  In other words, Jo is being blackmailed, so she agrees.  There is a montage of various exercises before Penn is taken on as a sort of partner in a series of cons.  They all involve convincing wealthy men to marry a supposedly broke member of British royalty, played by Jo.  The romance continues until they meet her crazy sister, Penn.  She behaves in an outrageous manner that abhors the potential suits.  Eventually, he has enough of Penn’s antics and leaves, telling Jo to keep the enormous ring he has given her.  However, Penn is angered when she is not given her cut of the money they have stolen, so she decides to go off on her own.  Jo believes it is back to business as usual until she sees Penn stomping around the hotels where she finds marks.  Following a scene created by Penn, her and Jo decide to make a bet.  They wager that they will be able to swindle a man out of $500,000, and whoever does it fastest not only wins, but the other must leave Beaumont-Sur-Mer.  The only thing left to do is to find a victim.  Upon witnessing tech billionaire Thomas Westerberg (Alex Sharp) fall into the pool, they decide he is the one.  For this one, Penn is supposed to be blind, and Jo is a German eye doctor.  They prey on his sympathies, getting him to agree to pay the fee for a surgery that will, of course, cover the cost of their wager.  Because of their success, it becomes simply a matter of who will collect the fee.  While it may seem obvious that it would go to Jo, it is Penn that gets closest to Thomas.  Penn is eventually told that Thomas is not as rich as they believe, and that he would be giving the last of the money he made from the app he developed.  The gesture shows that he is more altruistic than they thought, and Penn try to call off the bet.  Jo is unwilling to do so, and it changes to the first one get him in bed will win.  Jo is the one who is able to get Thomas alone, while Penn has been stuck inside her erstwhile partner’s house.  Upon extricating herself, Penn runs into Thomas, who says that nothing happened with Jo.  Instead, they go to the airport, trying to give each other the stated sum before he boards a plane to go home.  As he is about to take off, Jo arrives to say that nothing had happened, and that she had given him $500,000 for his new tech venture.  In other words, he had hustled the two women.  Two weeks later, Thomas comes to Jo’s mansion where Penn has been staying and recruits them to work with him on further cons.

The final scene of The Hustle is of our new criminal trio in London, plying their trade.  It is their trade that is, for obvious reasons, objectionable for this Catholic reviewer.  There is something to be said for how Jo and Penn identify male stereotypes that make their job necessary, at least in their eyes.  In a sense, they are getting retribution for the cruelty of men.  Indeed, Penn directly says at one point that she gets revenge on the marks who denigrate her on the basis of her sex or body size.  Revenge is not a Christian ideal, and the way they go about getting their comeuppance is through riches.  On that note, Thomas has an interesting thing to say before it is revealed he had been conning Jo and Penn the entire time.  In trying to convince Penn to take his supposed last thousands, he says that “the best thing money can do is good.”  Most of the rest of the movie is of little value from a Catholic perspective, but this statement caught my attention.  God calls us to do what is just and right in any situation, and this includes how we spend our earnings.  Even if that last bit does not apply to the film, particularly in light of who Thomas actually is, the sentiment still rings true.  While people like Jo, Penn, and Thomas use their ill-gotten gains for ill purposes, it is not the riches that are the problem, at least not in this situation.  Many assume that the Bible is the basis of the saying about how money is the root of all evil.  This is a misquote.  The actual verse comes from 1 Timothy 6:10, which reads, “For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.”  That accurately describes the activities of these con artists, which is one of the reasons I did not particularly enjoy this movie.

While I did not enjoy The Hustle, I did not hate it.  The film was okay, and it seemed like they were trying to set it up for a sequel.  It should not be surprising that a follow up never came.  There is nothing memorable about this one, and that is the biggest problem.