Had the makings of a good story.

Rating: 6/10 (4 March 2014)

A group of people are in a fancy hotel room in the 70s discussing some deal with a sheik. A briefcase is pushed in the direction of one of them. He gets outraged and leaves the meeting. The others push one of the guys to go after him.
Rewind to the beginning. Irv as child saw his father, the owner of the local window business, taken advantage off so he decided to even the score by breaking all windows he saw. As an adult he inherited the business, ended up owning some dry cleaning businesses and became a loan shark but the kind that don't give out any money, just charge a non-refundable fee to the desperate. At a party he meets Sydney who's way out of his league. But they were made for each other. All her life she dreamed of nothing but being someone else. She took on the persona of an English girl with financial connections in London.
Together they become better con-people and their business booms. One day one guy shows up who is way too happy for a guy out of his luck. Irv has reservations. Sure enough, he's an FBI agent. He makes a deal with the two after watching Sydney sweat for a couple of days in jail. If they con four other con-men they're free. But agent DiMaso has bigger plans. The name of a popular New Jersey politician comes up--Carmine Polito. He finds an equally ambitious district attorney. DiMaso's boss on the other hand wants nothing to do with his plans. Irv and DiMaso concoct some ludicrous plan to ensnare Polito. And Irv and Sydney plan to con DiMaso and use him. The idea is that a sheik will invest millions on Polito's plan to revitalize Atlantic City.
And now we're back were the movie starts. Irv runs after Polito and becomes his friend. He finds out that Polito is a genuine good guy. He cares only about his constituents and his large family that includes an adopted kid. We learn more about Irv. He has a wife and he treats her son as his own. We learn also about DiMaso. He's got a fiancée and a religious mother. Throughout this adventure, Irv and Sydney have a falling out, Sydney and DiMaso become close, Irv's wife will get them all in trouble and Irv has second thoughts about Polito taking the fall for no good reason. DiMaso sees a chance to catch not just local dirty politicians but Congressmen and Senators, who unlike Polito are all too happy to take a suitcase full of money. The mob gets involved too, since we're talking about casinos and gambling and the deal will have to be between the non-existent sheik and a Miami mobsters. Irv's wife has an affair with a mob captain. These two will provide the catalyst for the eventual unraveling of all this.
American Hustle starts out fairly strong, for the first hour or so. Then it runs out of steam in a spectacular fashion, keeps going for no good reason and barely recovers near the end. It's a reverse Scorsese show--the rise and fall of an FBI guy. Performances are very strong over all. Some of the situations the characters are put in a quite absurd but the actors' bravura make it work. At least, there is plenty of cleavage to make the boring half watchable.
When it comes to the relationship between the three main characters, the story is narrated from those three perspectives: Irv, Sydney and DiMaso. For some reason the director and editor lose sight of the main story at some point and focus on soap opera bits instead of advancing the story. When they manage to pick it up again, it's almost too late. And the way the resolution is told is surprisingly anti-climactic. There was a good story here but it's buried in non-sense. There are some good lines, too, but plenty of meaningless stuff that someone thought sounded real bright. 30-40 minutes could have easily been cut making this movie what it should have been- a smart, at time funny, and exciting drama about likable con-men, the mob, and the FBI.