In 2019, MGM remade Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) into The Hustle, and leaned hard into marketing for this new “feminist twist.” The gender-swapped remake replaced Michael Caine and Steve Martin with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson, and was supposedly a fresh take on the laugh-out-loud comedy where women would outsmart the men who underestimated them.
In practice, however, the ending of The Hustle undercut the entire premise. In Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Freddy and Lawrence are locked in a hilarious rivalry until their ultimate mark, Janet Colgate, turns out to be the real con artist, having been playing them all along. Janet flips the script, exposing the men’s egos and greed, and walks away in total control of the situation (and $50,000 richer). In Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the climactic ending is empowering: the underestimated woman was always two steps ahead.
The Hustle tried to mirror that twist, but with a key change: instead of the women winning, their mark (Alex Sharp as Thomas) is revealed as the true con artist. In a movie marketed as “feminist,” the final joke is that the women were duped all along. Instead of reclaiming power, Hathaway and Wilson’s characters become the butt of the joke.
The result is less a “feminist update” than it is a regression. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels gave its female character agency, intelligence, and the final laugh. The Hustle promised the same but left its heroines reduced to comic relief in a story supposedly rewritten for them and a new generation of viewers. What could have been a sharp gender-flipped satire ended up feeling like a hollow con in itself, one in which the female audience, not just the characters, was cheated.