This is an advance review out of the Toronto International Film Festival. Hustlers opens in the US and UK on Sept. 13 and in Australia on Oct. 10.
“The whole country is a strip club: you’ve got people throwing the money and you’ve got people doing the dance,” Jennifer Lopez’s Ramona says at a pivotal point of Hustlers; a simplistic but apt way of describing the search for power and control that drives this layered and unexpectedly weighty heist movie. Inspired by the 2015 New York Magazine piece “The Hustlers at Scores,” the Lorene Scafaria-directed and written film explores a group of strippers who brazenly embezzle money from rich club attendees.
We follow the group starting in 2007: Destiny (Constance Wu) is new to the club with the desire to take care of her ailing grandmother. She becomes entranced with Ramona, an ambitious veteran of the club whose entire focus is providing for her daughter, who soon takes Destiny under her wing. Things are going well until the 2008 recession: with powerful CEOs and stock brokers feeling the squeeze, they’re less likely to splash their cash in the club, prompting the enterprising Ramona to mastermind a new way of getting paid: drugging these powerful men and stealing their money.
Source: IGN.com Hustlers Review