An uninteresting con-comedy

Johnson Thomas

A rather tame, unprepossessing attempt at comedy, this film starting Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson works too hard to be funny, as a consequence, fails to generate laughs. Director Chris Addison has attempted to remake the 1988 Michael Caine-Steve Martin comedy Dirty Rotten Scoundrels by changing the gender of the leads and retaining most of the ideas and set-ups from original - the 1964 David Ni ven-Marlon Brando comedy “Bedtime Story.” This flat, lacklustre attempt fails to bring on the laughs.

Josephine Chesterfield (Anne Hathaway) specialises in conning posh fools while Penny Rust (Rebel Wilson) does the same to ordinary folk. When they decide to get together though, they hope to strike it richer by entering into a competition to a tech billionaire Thomas Westerburg’s (Alex Sharp ) pockets. But it doesn’t work out as smoothly as they hoped.

The feminist angle of vengeance against the men folk for exploiting women is just lip service here. It’s clear that the two are driven entirely by avarice and nothing else. There’s neither dramatic affect nor comedic to lighten the weight of seeing two u scrupulous women on the make. 

Neither Hathaway nor Wilson manage to strike sparks off each other nor are their together moments tied well enough to generate laughs. The writing is rather pedestrian - making even the most frivolous light hearted moments seem laboured. Hathaway’s clingy outfits and faux accents don’t come across as açcomplished. Rebel’s deadpan comic routine doesn’t catch fire either. The actresses are competent in their individual roles but together they amount to a damp squib. The plotting is unremarkable, the writing fails to give vein to humour and the narrative lacks slyness and guile. This attempt at comedy is rather unexciting and flat.