The Hustle

With cons being perpetrated on both sides of the camera, The Hustle turns moviegoers into its least suspecting victims.

This labored caper comedy is actually a gender-swapped remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels that doesn’t play to the talents of its two stars, and therefore doesn’t generate any rooting interest in the motives behind their unscrupulous schemes.

Once again, the action takes place in a seaside village along the French Riviera, where Josephine (Anne Hathaway) is an established swindler whose high-stakes male targets consist of chauvinist tourists with fat pocketbooks.

Her operation sails smoothly until the arrival of Penny (Rebel Wilson), a low-rent grafter who only wishes she could match Josephine’s levels of smugness and financial success. An attempted partnership falls apart, leading to a wager that involves the loser getting out of town.

Their agreed-upon target is Thomas (Alex Sharp), apparently an impressionable American tech billionaire in his 20s with plenty of disposable assets. Josephine and Penny compete to see who can bilk Thomas out of $500,000 first. That’s assuming they don’t kill each other first.

Hathaway and Wilson seem to have fun swapping accents and donning elaborate costumes, not to mention parading around exotic beachfront locales. Yet they never achieve the necessary odd-couple chemistry beneath the bickering to make either of them the least bit sympathetic.

Steve Martin and Michael Caine garnered more laughs in the prior film — which itself reprised the 1964 pairing of Marlon Brando and David Niven in Bedtime Story. This uneven effort feels flat and uninspired by comparison.

Wilson’s ruse, which involves blindness, feels somewhat tasteless compared to the psychosomatic paralysis that Martin and Brando staged in the two predecessors. And the film’s efforts to inject gender politics into the proceedings through Hathaway’s character aren’t very persuasive.

The screenplay can’t decide whether it’s content to simply rehash old material or chart new territory as some sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for scorned and vengeful women. The result gets caught somewhere in between, with only some intermittently amusing sequences to show for it.

British director Chris Addison, a television veteran making his feature debut, doesn’t inject much substance beneath the slick surface. Amid all of its deception and double-crossing, The Hustle doesn’t yield much of a return.

Rated PG-13, 94 minutes.