Hustlers (3/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 110 minutes

R.

This is the chick flick to end all chick flicks. It's a twisted “revenge” movie intending to show the grit of the strip club business, inspired by a New York Magazine article, “The Hustlers at Scores,” by Jessica Pressler from a script by Lorene Scafaria, who also directed. It has the typically hard to swallow slice of life dialogue endemic to all these films. It’s excruciating to watch and listen to them talk among themselves. Not even Sarah Bernhardt or Bette Davis could make this dialogue palatable.

Jennifer Lopez plays the materfamilias to Constance Wu and several other workers at a relatively tame strip club apparently catering to wealthy Wall Street types and she does a pretty good job considering what she had to work with.

However, the premise of the film leaves a lot to be desired. These are women in the sex industry who voluntarily strip and perform lap dances (among other acts) simulating sex for customers who pay them. In real clubs like this there is at least partial (topless) nudity, but not in this club. While the women wear scanty costumes, comparing reel life with real life they might as well all be wearing parkas (there are only a couple of topless women and they appear in the background in dressing room scenes). I guess the stars wanted to present a gritty story but didn’t have the guts to present the way it really is.

While the women putting this out try to make their stars sympathetic, when you get down to it they are nothing but vicious, heartless predators. Their solution to making money is to solicit men, spike their drinks with drugs, take their credit cards and max them out and then leave them to awaken, considerably poorer.

Not only does Scafaria try her best to make the women appealing, she also makes sure that all the men in the movie, including some who are not johns, are despicable. Assuming facts not anywhere in evidence, it is apparently her opinion that the johns in the movie are, according to the production notes, “these tycoons (who) have long been making money off the broken dreams of everyday Americans, and, the ladies’ reason, it’s time to turn things around.” Only one of the “tycoons” inspires even a little sympathy when they ruin him. So the justification is that they are getting back at men who exploit them. But they are willing participants in what they do and the men pay them money; that’s why they are there and it’s why they do what they do. So why are the men the bad guys?

I loathed this movie but my female assistant gave it a 7/10, which is why my rating is 3/10 instead of 1/10. I guess some women are going to like it.

That said, there is still a place for a movie that does look at the depressing world of women who feel they have no alternative but to make a living selling their bodies and violating moral values. While some strippers  and sex workers might be content, the presumption is that many of them (many are undoubtedly sex slaves run by organized crime) find themselves trapped in a world with no way out. That’s a movie that could do some good. This is not it.