For a lot of people, "Jennifer Lawrence stars as a stripper" is probably enough of a description of a movie to get people to notice, and while there's plenty of attractive women spinning on poles in the first trailer for the new movies Hustlers, there's also a bit more going on. The film follows a group of co-workers who are dealing with economic hardships, and using their one advantage to get what they need, and maybe punish a few people they deem worthy of punishment. Check out the new trailer below.
Hustlers tells the story a group of strippers with a large clientele around Wall Street. The film takes place following the economic collapse and the women all find themselves struggling to get by, supporting families on meager incomes, while those of Wall St. continue to succeed, even after having caused the economic catastrophe that has put them in such dire straights.
The women then hatch a plot that they see as getting a measure of revenge, but one that also greatly enhances their own wealth. They get the customer at the strip club incredibly drunk and then run up his credit card and pocket the profit. The assumption, quite rightly being, that the men can both afford the hit, and if they suspect that they were taken advantage of, they likely won't say anything in order to avoid admitting what they were up to.
If it feels like something like this could actually happen, it did. The film is based on a New York Magazine article entitled "The Hustlers at Scores" which told the real life story of the women involved in the scam.
Hustlers has a solid cast consisting of Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu as two of the women stealing the money. Cardi B. only has a brief appearance in the trailer, though one assumes she'll play a significant role in the final product. Julia Stiles also appears, a phrase that should be used to describe more movies than it does, apparently as a shrink that one of the characters is seeing who learns the whole story. I can see the doctor's office as a framing device to set up the story.
While the movie may be about strippers, the trailer isn't selling itself solely on sex appeal, though there's clearly plenty of that.
Hustlers may not look like the sort of film that's going to blow up the box office, but that's what's actually sort of refreshing about it. This is clearly a smaller film with a smaller budget but it's the sort of drama that almost certainly has an audience out there somewhere, it just needs to find it. So much of Hollywood is focused on hitting home runs, making massive movies that require massive returns to be successful, it's nice to see a smaller film even trying to succeed.
Hustlers hits theaters in September.
