American Ham

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2013)

American Hustle is a fine movie, I suppose. I'm not really sure, to be honest. The problem is it's such a hamfest of a movie, it's hard to focus to know for sure.
This film has a lot going on beyond the characters and the story. It's set in the 70's, and such a horrendously clichéd version of the 70's it distracts you from those characters & story. You've got the red velvet leisure suits; the badly-fitting toupees; the ridiculously over-sized automobiles; the tight-curl perms; the bra-less, droopy dresses (OK, some distractions are worth it). Folks use "ham" to describe over-the-top acting, but here we have undeniably "hammy" use of sets, costumes, props, and locations. It's as if someone said "find me everything 70's and dump it in this movie!".
The problem is they don't just use these clichés for setting and atmosphere (like "The Ice Storm", for example), they just pile them up throughout the movie, right down to hackneyed scenes involving 70's-era mobsters late in the film. It's a cliché fest, and that distracts from the rest of the story. It's hard to take the main protagonist seriously under those ridiculous glasses.
Then again, it is a fairly shallow plot, with a somewhat weak "surprise ending", wrapping up the con inside a con inside a con. You've seen it all before, in movies of the "con man" genre over the decades. I'm guessing the writers wanted to dump all the 70's clichés into one film and wrote tossed together a con-man script to tie them together; OR they had a fairly weak script and felt they needed to dress it up with 70's nostalgia to generate interest.
The movie is OK. It has some funny moments. But it's not worth a full-price movie ticket, and is definitely not worth an Oscar nod.