The elements of this film do not work. It is one of those movies like The Counselor or Righteous Kill that has a fine cast of talented actors and hands them an unworkable script. For Catherine Deneuve, the solution is simple. She should not be in this movie at all. She makes no sense as an upscale LA prostitute. Faye Dunaway or Catherine Bach (who is in the movie) could have played this part far more convincingly. It doesn't matter though because Deneuve's character shouldn't be in the movie anyway. Her scenes as a cop's love interest are so boring and pointless... they make the movie very hard to get through. Burt Reynolds is fine as a depressed alcoholic cop. His character pretty much does acts believably, drinking, hanging around bars, solving crimes when he can. It's not believable that he also runs around with Catherine Deneuve and goes to see French films with her, or that the filmmakers could have thought that we wanted to watch several long conversations between the two. Storywise, the characters talk about a young dead woman in vile ways, and it makes for very sleazy viewing, as does her father's roaming strip clubs trying to prove that she was murdered. The sleazy parts about the young dead girl jar badly with the pseudo-intellectual nonsense of the boring Reynolds-Deneuve scenes. The movie tries to have heart for it's absurd romantic plot line and has none for the portrayal of the victim and her parents, where it would actually make more sense. I'd always been told that George C. Scot's HARDCORE was a really sleazy movie. I saw it though, and I thought it had a lot of heart and an intelligent script. HUSTLE, by contrast, fails at showing heart and almost collapses under its own sleaziness. Almost, because what really collapses this film is dull romance between a realistic alcoholic burnout and a magical fairy lady from Narnia.
Review of Hustle
