Thrilling ensemble piece of corruption and conmen. Fantastic to the last!

Rating: 9/10 (7 January 2014)

American Hustle opens with the text: Some of this actually happened. Oh, that it were truly the case.
Well, actually it is. Sort of.
David O. Russell reunites the stars (Bradley Cooper & Jennifer Lawrence) of his starkly different but equally superb Silver Linings Playbook in a fantastic yarn, about a brazen conman, that bubbles along from the off and jostles the viewer along with its boundless energy and audacity. American Hustle lifts elements of a certain reality and weaves it into a fiction that is an absolute romp.
Conman Irving Rosenfield (Christian Bale) is a smalltime wide boy who falls completely for the seductive, sharp-thinking Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and forms a partnership for more not-so-petty scamming. Entrapped by FBI agent Richie Di Maso (Cooper), who has promotion in mind and far bigger fish he wishes to fry, Irving and Sydney are forced into organizing the mother of all cons that Richie hopes will bring down Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), the big cheeses in the Mafia and a host of politicians. It is a convoluted and dangerous plan fighting corruption with corruption and with money, power and lives at risk. And hiding in the wings is Rosalyn (Lawrence), Irving's highly-strung, volatile wife.
There is so much energy coursing through American Hustle with writers, director and cast on terrific form. This is such a cleverly crafted and beautifully written film with an accomplished director, who can evidently juggle multitudinous strands and ideas, in the chair, and a starry cast that would struggle not to make the best of it. They do, and it keeps the audience riveted until the fat lady sings.
Bale, with a comb over that is so awful you have to love it, struts his portly stuff with arrogant panache. Frequently he displays signs of Robert De Niro (in his heyday, not the De Niro of The Family) but Bale is in a class of his own when it comes to method, intensity and versatility and though his Irving is no Adonis, like Sydney, we can't help but fall for him completely.
There are many films were the star power works on paper (Larry Crowne, any one?) but on film it is very obvious that someone forgot to invite the chemistry along to the party. Not so here. There is a fantastic crackle of electricity between the principal quintet and, though Bale is clearly in command of our attention here, it is in the company of his peers that he plays hardest. The relationship that develops between Irving and Carmine adds a gentleness to the boisterous mayhem that bubbles away behind the scheming.
Apart, both Lawrence and Adams are exciting in their performances as the ladies in Irving's life but, though this is the seventies, neither woman is a doormat and both hold the men around them by the short and curlies, one with guile, the other with desperation. And when they finally share a room, oh boy, hell freezing over could never be that glacial! Cooper, though not in the same league as Bale, adds another superb blend of bumbler and Jack the lad to his CV. Always watchable, inevitably entertaining, he is the equal of his co-stars in this wonderful ensemble piece that will remain vivid in the memory even when we are preparing to bid this year farewell.
American Hustle thoroughly delights, entertains and will surely end the year laden with gold honestly gained. Throughout, it is thrilling, funny, dramatic and intense. As the narrative unravels so do the plans of the protagonists, while their lives become ever more complicated by predicaments that could only exist in the mind of the most creative of writers.
Couldn't they?
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