It's true.
Unlike most people, I did not enjoy his previous film, Silver Linings Playbook.
It simply fell flat for me. And at no point did I find the concept worthy of a full-length feature. So when the trailers came out for American Hustle I was seriously nervous. Mostly I found myself mourning his earlier works, Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees and The Fighter. But then I saw the movie.
American Hustle is gripping. It does just enough at every turn to keep you paying attention. And it is very very well cast.
Christian Bale does an excellent job. He seems to work well with everybody. Amy Adams is a treat. It nice to see her getting an opportunity to show a few sides of herself she really doesn't get to express that often. Bradley Cooper is very serviceable and has some hilarious sequences with Louis C. K. (so glad he's in this one by the way). And Jennifer Lawrence, in tandem with Christian Bale, has legitimately the best scene in the entire film. That really only leaves Jeremy Renner. If I were to rate his performance scene by scene he would get an A for Acting nine times out of ten. But that final scene was so completely discombobulated that it leaves a bad mark on the rest of his work. It's really too bad too. I don't even think it was his fault to be honest. It feels as though in post, the scene got torn up and left in pieces on the cutting room floor. Perhaps those additional pieces just didn't fit the rest of the film. Oh well. Too bad so sad.
David O. Russell doesn't really strike me as a sentimentalist anyway.
But American Hustle as a whole is a very solid movie. The twists are actually twists and the concept is fun and always interesting. After a massive success with what I see as a completely overrated film, David O. Russell came back and made a movie actually worth watching. Kudos to that.
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