Review: American Hustle

City Paper grade: B- 

A lumpy cocktail of polyester suits and plunging necklines, David O. Russell’s semi-fictional take on the Abscam scandal wants to be a movie and a half. The performances — especially by Christian Bale (wielding his pot belly like a tank) and Bradley Cooper (here, as in Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, urged toward his worst instincts) — are oversized, the plot overloaded, the camera work arbitrarily frenetic. When Russell’s not ripping off GoodFellas — which, very frequently, he is — he likes to pointlessly swing the camera toward an actor’s hands and back up again, not because hands are important but because he just can’t keep still. Unlike, say, Robert Altman or David Mamet, Russell doesn’t have any particular affection or feel for the professional con artists played by Bale and Amy Adams, and he garbles a subplot about how Adams got stuck for months using a fake English accent with Cooper’s FBI agent. But then almost everything about American Hustle is garbled; the good bits (which are significant) are mixed in with the junk willy-nilly. Even for Russell, who’s hardly a master of structure, it’s an unforgivably sloppy mess. That people buy into it feels like the biggest swindle of all.