With a budget of just $20 million, ‘Hustlers’ starring superstar Jennifer Lopez managed to raise almost $160 million worldwide. A real hit that you probably didn’t expect. The sexy heist thriller was not only a truly surprising success at the box office, but also received almost exclusively positive feedback from the international trade press (the average review score on Rotter Tomatoes is a sensational 87%).
Anyone who missed Lorene Scafaria’s heist thriller (“In Search of a Friend for the End of the World”), which is based on true events and in which Jennifer Lopez easily wraps the audience around her finger, is in theaters and may already have been wanting to see it done for a while, can now catch up with a subscription to Amazon Prime Video.
Martin Scorsese was the model for ‘Hustlers’.
In the official FILMSTARTS review, “Hustlers” received a whopping 4 out of 5 possible stars. In his conclusion, our author Carsten Baumgardt writes, among other things: “‘Hustlers’ is an entertaining, energetic character portrait of strong women who fight with finesse and violence for their place in the rough streets of New York – and a smashing comeback for Jennifer Lopez !”
“Hustlers” is repeatedly based on the cinema of Martin Scorsese, who was originally considered to direct and was the first choice of the producers (including Will Ferrell and Adam McKay). The criticism about this is:
“Warmed by an energetic R&B soundtrack with songs from Britney Spears, Bob Seger and Janet Jackson At its best, ‘Hustlers’ is reminiscent of a stripper version of ‘GoodFellas’even if the film ultimately cannot quite match the virtuosity of Martin Scorsese’s crime masterpiece.”
Even if “Hustlers” ultimately falls short of Scorsese’s finest moments and director Lorene Scafaria is less concerned with moral discourse, it’s still a heist thriller. incredibly effective, exciting and damn sexy. So not only is there a lot of seductive display on offer, it is also quite fun to see how arrogant bigwigs parade here and therefore have to swallow their own medicine.
That’s what ‘Hustlers’ is about
Strippers Ramona Vega (Lopez), Destiny (Constance Wu), Diamond (Cardi B) and their colleagues work hard every night to keep their sleazy and equally wealthy clientele as satisfied as possible. Although they largely consist of wealthy Wall Street speculators, the women take home only a pittance every evening, barely covering the rent.
This should be over once and for all. Together they devise a clever plan to rob the businessmen of their wealth: they drug the men so that they are blissfully blurred and can’t remember anything later, while the strippers happily plunder the credit card accounts. But at some point it all gets out of hand…