I wanted to like this film, but couldn't

Rating: 2/10 (15 December 2015)

Going in to a film called "American Hustle", you would expect to see some sort of... well anything that the word "hustle" implies. Action, a fast pace of "hustling" around in the con man world, unexpected twists, actual run ins with mafia or dangerous people, some sort of con/heist to blow you away and separate itself from all the other con artist films and TV shows. Nope. This movie amounted to a whole lot of, essentially, business meetings and then a side plot of Irving figuring out how to handle his wife being overly depressed and perhaps having other mental illnesses. Seeing as the entire movie is showcasing how incompetent the main characters are because of their guilt, lack of humanity, or health problems, the last five minutes trying to wrap up the story in a happy, neat package felt rather out of place.
When the only person in the cast that's a likable, somewhat nice, person is the supposedly corrupt politician they're trying to entrap and send to jail, that's saying something about how the script fails at getting you to like the main characters. I would actually say Jeremy Renner did the best acting of the film too. He played his role as the altruistic New Jersey mayor who gets tricked really well. He is the only one who maintained his New Jersey accent the entire time without slipping up too.
The way the narration was, perhaps the director wanted us to feel sympathy towards Irving for being "stuck" with a mentally ill wife, but instead we feel sympathy towards Rosalynd for being with a lying, cheating husband who really was never there and was literally mad at her for having a mental illness or two. Rather than help his wife, he abandons her for another woman without "problems" and belittles her for her mental illness. The other issue with him never really being there at his home, is that we are supposed to believe his reason for staying married to a wife he doesn't love was to "be there" for her son. Laughable considering he showed up maybe two or three times to their house the entire movie and when he did, he shooed the son away pretty much instantly so he could spend his time yelling at the son's mom for being too depressed.
There was a lot of misplaced humor (lets give the depressed wife all the humorous scenes and lines?), no witty, meaningful or interesting dialogue, no palatable tension, no "come together" aha twist at the end, no likable characters... everything that makes a movie great, this movie lacked. I don't think there was a single quotable line other than ones similar to what you could find when googling inspirational quotes about finding yourself.
They decided to include "mafia" in the last line of the plot description and that was highly inaccurate. The "mafia" man they encounter (wouldn't call it opening them to the mafia world) lasts a whopping 2-5 minutes and is spent sitting around a table talking about money and failed entirely at creating any sort of tension (a 1-2 second flashback to the mob man shooting a single man in the street is supposed to make us afraid). A more accurate description of this movie would be: "A con man, Irving Rosenfeld, along with his partner Sydney Prosser, is forced to choose between kidnapping his son and fleeing the country or working for a desperate FBI agent, Richie DiMaso, who pushes them into sitting around tables and convincing New Jersey politicians and businessmen to break the law. They decide to try their chances with the FBI and then after 90% of the movie is over finally realize that was a huge mistake."