The hustle is in the making.

Rating: 6/10 (23 December 2013)

There are a quartet of excellent performances to be found in this fast and loose re-telling of what led to the famous ABSCAM sting involving congressman and corrupt Jersey pols back in the 80s but under the guidance of David O Russell's feverish, erratic direction the film implodes into improbable silliness before its pat happily ever after finish.
Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale)is a career con artist with a chain of dry cleaning stores (how appropriate) and a phony investment business that scams desperate investors with the promise of a heavy return. He meets Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) a Jersey stripper who can produce a fetching English accent and the business takes off as well as their intimate relationship. When she gets busted by a hyper intense FBI agent Richie DiMaso ( Bradley Cooper) they agree to working a sting that starts out small but mushrooms big time when the DC pols develop a taste for some illicit green waved in front of them. Mob involvement raises the stakes.
Leading man Bale is outstanding as the romantic oily con artist with a flamboyant comb over, pot belly and heart of gold that fails to ring true in the long run by going soft with his mark a crooked Camden mayor, Sol Politto (cinematographer homage?) another sweetheart of a guy with a Brady bunch family, including an adopted black kid, greedy for bucks but all in the name of altruism. Adams, Cooper, Jeremy Renner as the mayor and Jennifer Lawrence as Irv's off the wall wife more than hold their own with the superb Bale but the projectory of the story begins to lose thrust halfway through as Russell struggles to amp up the suspense with smoke, mirrors and a hint of slapstick.
Hustle pads itself heavily with music video to give it an energy and many scenes crackle with it as agent DiMaso, Irving and Sydney play a sexual tension cat and mouse game with each other. But Russell as he did in his last overheated exercise Silver Linings Playbook fails to maintain a consistent mood, vacillating between tension and humor to tell his story making it uneven and ultimately unconvincing as it ties up loose ends in a mawkish way with Russell sacrificing verisimilitude in favor of making his loathsome characters warm and fuzzy for audience consumption. Just like Irving's bilked clients you only find out at the end you are the one who has been had.