Hustlers is both a lighthearted heist flick and a cautionary tale

Chris Knight: The film walks a fine line between playing a Robin Hood heist for laughs and (almost) condoning it

Lili Reinhart, Jennifer Lopez, Keke Palmer, and Constance Wu. Elevation Pictures

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“This is a story about control. You got people tossing the money and people doing the dance.”

Those are the first and (more or less) the last words in Hustlers, a based-on-a-true-story crime drama about a group of New York strippers who respond to the financial crisis of 2008 by changing how they treat their male clients. Rather than get the guys drunk and show them a good time, they drug them silly and max out their credit cards.

Lopez, Wu. Elevation Pictures

“Short cut” is what ringleader Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) calls the operation, loftily promising “no one gets hurt.” That breezy denial goes a long way to explaining how writer/director Lorene Scafaria manages to wring such sympathy (and not a few laughs) from audiences that are basically watching men getting financially taken advantage of. If the sexes were reversed, this would be a very different movie.

The plot unfolds in the eyes of Destiny (Crazy Rich Asians’ Constance Wu), a young stripper trying to support her impoverished grandmother and, later, a young child. We see her talking to a wide-eyed journalist played by Julia Stiles; the screenplay is based on a 2015 New York Magazine article by Jessica Pressler.

Destiny gets taken under the wing of the older stripper, and they hatch a plan to lure men back to the club in exchange for a cut of the customers’ spendings. It’s a win-win for the women – they make money without being groped or undressed – but when the 2008 financial crisis hits and the Wall Street high-rollers stop coming out, the women up their game by introducing “a sprinkle” of ketamine and MDMA into guys’ drinks. The men have a good time, pass out and remember little, least of all how they gave their credit card PINs to their new “friends.”

Hustlers walks a fine line between playing this Robin Hood heist for laughs and (almost) condoning it, though a mid-film Champagne-fuelled celebration by Ramona’s merry women suggests their own crash is coming. (Scenes like this only bode well if they end the movie.) And Destiny clearly has greater qualms than her mentor about what they’re doing, especially after some poor sucker informs her that his mortgage and childcare are on the line after they drained his credit cards.

Thus does the movie function on two levels; on the one hand an almost lighthearted heist flick, on the other a cautionary tale, not just about the women’s crime, but about a broken system that encourages bad behaviour to flourish on both sides. After all, it’s hard to fault the ones doing the dance when they want to be the ones throwing the money for a while.