Hustlers Hustles in $33.2 Million in Box-Office Receipts; The Best Live-Action Film Opening Of Lopez’s Career To Date
Hustlers, is based on a true story of a group of women strip club dancers who turn the tide on their exploitative Wall St. patrons is a raw, in your face drama centered around the relationship between two women from different backgrounds. It’s a fast-paced female-driven story about working-class women and their struggles to make ends meet and the revealing reasons why. No Magic Mike sexist fantasy bullsh%t here, this is an in your face no-nonsense real deal. It also functions as an expose of a seedy, glitzy “Flesh and Flash” world, where business transactions involve lap dances and champagne rooms for high-end clients with lots of disposable cash and $100,000 credit card limits.
As alluded to in the film by one of the characters, it’s nothing but the American way, no different from Wall Street business commodity transactions and the satisfaction derived from monetary gains.
Jennifer Lopez is Ramona Vega, a single mother from the Bronx who has scored the key to success in the high-end strip club in New York City. develops a friendship with Destiny, a neophyte girl at the club, superbly played by Constance Wu (Crazy Rich Asians).
Destiny was abandoned at an early age and lives alone with the aging and ailing grandmother who raised her. Ramona mentors and then partners up with Destiny in order to further expand and exploit their clientele with a Latina/Asian Duo.
Life is good until the financial crisis of 2008 hits and the bottom falls out of the business The extravagant lifestyles they have attained is no longer. They are forced to return to their working-class lifestyle. Soon after Ramona devises a plan to fleece their former and new strip club patrons as a recovery looms.
Lopez gives a startling portrayal as the self-assured but vulnerable Ramona whose presence is central to every scene she’s in. With a hard edge New York take-charge Bronx attitude and brilliant makeup, hairstyles and outfits she creates a rarely seen Latina lead character.
At 50 years of age, Lopez is an amazing testament to physically fit womanhood when she struts her stuff in a pole dancing sequence and instructs Destiny on the finer points of dance.
The role of Ramona also gives Lopez the opportunity to reveal what drives this mature experienced single mom who has gone through some hard knocks and uses her smarts and physical assets to make her way in life and raise her daughter. She seems to have brought something of her own life experience to her portrayal, which had film critics at the Toronto Film Festival, where it premiered, talking about an Oscar nomination for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress. The film is told from Destiny point of view as she lets herself be taken under Ramona’s wing as if guiding a younger version of herself.
The audience gets revealing glimpses into the other women’s lives saddled with deadbeat husbands, incarcerated boyfriends, dead-end jobs, jealous lovers and family estrangements.
In that sense, they should both receive Oscar nominations because they both work off each other’s strong and very different portrayals.
Lopez’s Ramona is one of the few leading multi-layered complex American characters of Latin descent to be seen on American screens in a long time in contemporary feature films.
Hustlers features a multi-ethnic diverse cast of women including Cardi B., Lili Reinhart, Lizzo, Keke Palmer, Madeline Brewer Dawson, and Trace Lysette. Writer-director Linda Scarfaria understands, and has a firm directorial grasp on the material and brings female insight and vision to the film in which women literally take center stage. Men are central to the story but they are on the periphery.
Lopez is one of the producers of the film along with her longtime manager/producer Benny Medina and Will Ferrell.
Hustlers hustled in $33.2 million dollars in box-office receipts during this past weekends’ opening making it a hit and the best live-action film opening of Lopez’s career to date.
According to the Hollywood Reporter. the audience was overwhelmingly 67 % female of which 27% were Hispanic ticket buyers. Hustlers is sure to be a most talked-about film for quite some time.