Reviews

The majority of people offended by this show are going to be highly religious people or people who take religion very seriously. The vulgarity of it is on par with other similar rated R or TV-MA material IMO.

Contrary to the impression that its just going to be a sex jokes movie, the general theme involves poking fun at religious beliefs on the basis of blind faith. If you are someone who brings a critical eye to religion or doesn't take religion too seriously and you don't mind sex jokes (that poke fun on all kinds of relationships), this movie will be a fast favorite. We haven't laughed so hard in a long time. Sam Harris would be proud.

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."

This movie is hard to discuss without "spoiling" some of it. I feel like the less you know going in, the more you'll get from it. Don't watch this alone, not because it's scary (it's not "horror" at all really in the typical sense - the deaths are not gory or violent as in typical horror films, so much as sudden and suspenseful), but because you are going to want someone to discuss it with as soon as it's over.

This movie was not made to excite or scare you, so if you are looking for an exciting action horror, this definitely isn't in that genre, though it's exciting and suspenseful in a different way. It is a "thinky" movie with quite a few twists you don't expect, meant to make you uncomfortable, meant to force you to ask some pretty deep, tough questions, mainly about the value society places on individual lives and whether or not we, as a society, are actually justified in the way we think about various topics. Not comfortable topics. If you enjoy thought provoking, suspenseful films you can spend hours analyzing afterward, you will enjoy this one.

Very thought provoking questions get inadvertently presented along the way as you watch the characters discuss snippets of their lives in an intense debate and then literally vote to kill each other off based on these characteristics.

The purpose of the movie really is more along the lines of promoting equality, acceptance and creating a dialogue about challenging society's typical way of thinking about people's worth and value. Although the sci-fi based plot you have to accept in order to get into the discussion itself is (obviously) far fetched and not that logical, it's so successful at getting a lot of hard, but important, questions in in a short amount of time and provides a very visual way to take in what these questions really have the potential to mean, especially as us humans actually are working towards the goal of creating a "global" society that values true equality.

It forces you to face a lot of questions about yourself, how you view others and how society views people and whether or not the views we hold about the value of an individual are actually worth keeping. The reason I feel this film is so brilliant is that it's able to entertain you in a different way and yet open up specific moral questions for a discussion on at least 15-20 different hot topics. The flaws you notice along the way end up feeling very deliberate by the time you sit and ask yourself the questions that this film begs you to decide for yourself on.

It is true that the ending initially left a bit to be desired and made you say "NO! What? That's it?", but after sitting on it, I feel like it was actually quite a brilliant way to end given the obvious purpose behind the movie. What better way to end a film that was intended to have you face so many unanswered hard moral questions than in an "unanswered" way? People are so used to getting all the answers at the end of movies, having all the strings tied up by having bad guys lose and good guys win "the way it's supposed to be", but real life is not like that, real life is not "fair" and this movie was supposed to reflect on that exact point of reality "life is NOT fair". Seeing as the purpose of this movie was not to give you answers, but to ask you questions, it actually feels so purposefully flawed to have it end the way it did.

I gave it a 9 because there were a few minor details or areas of dialogue we felt could've been changed to make it even better. We also all agreed (as some other reviewers have stated) that it would've been a much better twist to have the people who "died" actually be alive in the end, though at the same time we understand the impact of not giving in to that desired ending. At the same time, the film does leave it open ended enough that you could still even come to the conclusion the people never died on your own anyway.