A Surprisingly Great Movie

Rating: 9/10 (13 January 2014)

I'll get this out of the way right now: I'm not the biggest fan of David O. Russell. Nothing against him personally, but, after having seen The Fighter and The Silver Linings Playbook, he just doesn't do it for me in general. The former was okay, while the latter crapped out with some dumb script contrivances in the third-act. He's like Quentin Tarantino: talented, but not my cup of tea. The only difference? Tarantino is too chatty and over-the-top, while O. Russell is overly blunt and melodramatic.
I say this because American Hustle genuinely surprised me. It's not the deepest movie by any means, nor is it the most profound, but it IS a well put-together film about how insignificant we really are in the grand scheme of things. Everyone is just trying to scrape by, even the incredibly ambitious, and denying that reality only makes your inevitable wake up call that much more disturbing. And this is what really makes the movie shine, even amidst the hilarity and shallowness that frequently goes on on-screen.
It's most likely that I'll end up being alone on this one, or perhaps in the minority, but this is one of my favourite movies of 2013. I found it more compelling than The Wolf of Wall Street, much funnier than Nebraska and even more of a well-written character piece than Saving Mr. Banks. I mean no disrespect to any of those movies, I liked all of them, but it was just no contest. I've been told that American Hustle will be forgotten in a year, but I say that it'll be more remembered than people give it credit for; after all, it has one of the greatest end- twists I've seen in the past decade! That has to account for something, right?
4.5/5...