AMERICAN HUSTLE

4 and a half stars. Yes.

Pros At A Con

Mini Review:

There’s nothing more delightful than a con film where the cleanest guy is a politician! The film hurtles at breakneck speed down a mountain of awesome performances, giving you just enough time to enjoy plunging necklines, shocking toupees and Duke Ellington

Main Review:

Dere’s a man who’s growed up on the wrong side of da tracks and he’s made it big. And dis Irving, he’s led b-aye a g-hurl who slips into a poh-sh Brit accent and bats her saucer eyes to seduce Irving to the tunes of Duke Ellington into making more money. This girl is called Sydney, and she puts an arm around the FBI agent making Irving insanely jealous. But Irving is already being driven to insanity by his wife Rosalyn who is, according to Irving,  the ‘Picasso of passive aggressive karate..’ The FBI, the mob and politicians want a finger in the pie too. And with each of the characters hustling each other, there’s nothing to do but to be swept away by the events on screen. And the director assures us that ‘some of these things really happened’.

Why did I give the story out in the review? Trust me, this con movie has so many twists and turns that you might thank me for offering a guide map on the back of a cheese-popcorn stained napkin.

And there’s cheese. Delightful conversations with rollers in the hair, confrontation between wife and lover, dancing so close you wonder if the heroine had to make her stomach concave to accommodate the hero’s paunch, femme fatale acts on willing macho men…

This movie has so much, you have to see it again, if only to enjoy the crackling dialog. To watch Batman, Hawkeye and Katniss Everdeen having so much fun in not being Batman, Hawkeye and Katniss is a thing of joy. And when Bradley Cooper admits hesitantly that he may have a fiancee, you want to run to the projectionist and beg him to rewind the movie so you could watch the scene again.

Whether there was a real life scam involving the FBI agents bribing a rich, foreign person is for pundits to decide. You will simply love the madness of the hustling, which peels of layer by awesome layer until the very end.

Go watch the movie already! I will go back to standing in front of the mirror practising and elaborate combover…


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