The Hustle review: Anne Hathaway’s girl-power heist film is devoid of humour, chemistry and logic

Dir: Chris Addison. Starring: Rebel Wilson, Anne Hathaway, Alex Sharp, Ingrid Oliver. 12A cert, 94 mins

To say that I didn’t laugh once during The Hustle would be factually accurate, yet it doesn’t quite capture the strength and intensity of the not-laughing I was doing throughout. Here is a comedy so relentlessly and violently toe-curling that I left the cinema walking like one of the velociraptors that clacks along the kitchen worktops at the end of Jurassic Park.

Originally titled “Nasty Women” after the Trumpian jibe from the 2016 American Presidential campaign trail, it is a gender-flipped remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels – itself a remake of the 1964 film Bedtime Story – with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson in for Michael Caine and Steve Martin. The setting remains the fictional millionaire’s playground of Beaumont-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur, where Josephine Chesterfield, Hathaway’s cut-glass-accented coquette, fleeces any tycoon or playboy dumb enough to try their luck.

The arrival of Wilson’s lower-level scam artist Penny Rust lobs an unwieldy spanner into her carefully calibrated routines, so Josephine offers to become her mentor, before a falling-out over money turns them into arch-rivals, with each one vying to be the first to wheedle $500,000 out of Alex Sharp’s guileless young tech entrepreneur.

The theoretical girl-power twist is that both women are only able to swindle men who are shallow and/or predatory enough to deserve it: Hathaway acts the doe-eyed damsel, while Wilson flashes a photograph of an attractive (and fictional) younger sister, who needs assistance with medical bills, and sometimes ransom money. But the switch from male to female leads has been done with so little apparent regard for how it might actually affect the plot that entire tracts of the film, including its finale, now land like poorly tossed pancakes.

Hathaway comes out of it mostly unscathed. There’s obviously some mileage in having her star in a glamorous farce – just not this one – and her wardrobe, by turns chic and eccentric, is the unquestionable on-screen MVP. But Wilson seems content to revert to the same brash Aussie shtick that wore extremely thin over the course of three Pitch Perfects, and quickly becomes a tractor tyre around the film’s neck.

Worst of all, they’ve no chemistry: their repartée doesn’t connect and their frequently traded insults – “big-d--ked Russell Crowe”, “animatronic c--k-tease” and so forth – barely make sense.

For some unfathomable reason, The Hustle was directed by Chris Addison, the Welsh star of The Thick of it and Mock the Week and a sometime-behind-camera presence on Armando Iannucci’s Veep. Whatever it was that first attracted him to the project, he and his collaborators have wiped out every last trace of it.