Hustle

Hustle plays like the angry, exhausted conclusion to a long-running police serial beamed in from the misery dimension. The staging is flat and workmanlike, the pace glacial. Violence is punchy, but bloodless. Mouths form vulgarities, but only substitute words spill out. The real nasty is in the way characters interact. They scrape and collide with each other, their interactions stripped of anything but disgust and chronic impatience. The atmosphere tips all the way into poisonous when the central thesis emerges - citizens, and their offspring, as little more than commodities to be used up and shit out by the ruling class. Hustle's regents don't even have the common decency to hide their dirt, instead they proudly boast over liquid lunches with law enforcement. Burt Reynolds stews as Lieutenant Phil Gaines, a boozy, brawling, balling, cop who labours with a faint shred of human decency. His block head and Frankenstein's Monster frame recalls Ralph Meeker's pure thug Mike Hammer from Aldrich's other private dick flick Kiss Me Deadly. Like Hammer, Gaines is similarly inclined to shack up with sex workers then beat his love into them.