You might predict every move in 'Hustle,' but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable 📝: Stephanie Zacharek (szacharek)
and pro basketball player Juancho Hernangómez, making his movie debut—manage to inflict a kind of magical amnesia, making you forget you’ve already seen it all just before they show it to you all over again.works its smooth moves scene after scene and ends with a satisfying whoosh, something like the sound of a ball sweeping through the net after circling the hoop for a suspenseful second or two..
This wunderkind’s name is Bo Cruz , and he lives with his mother and young daughter , supporting them by doing construction work. It takes a while for Stanley to persuade Bo to come back to the States for a shot at playing with the 76ers—Bo is certain, at first, that Stanley is a stalker weirdo. Only after Stanley manages to seal the deal does he get bad news from his boss: Vince doesn’t like the look of the kid and wants Stanley to keep searching.
is a passion project for Sandler, an avid basketball fan. Zagar, director of the beautifully observed 2018 coming-of-age drama—and a native of South Philly himself—shapes this story with a great deal of vitality and feeling. Some of the camera work is gratuitously jiggly; it’s not clear why we need so many blurry, angled closeups of Stanley’s graying beard. But the basketball scenes have a cool, clean energy, and Zagar draws subtly wrought performances even from his rookie actors.
And while Sandler has given some fine dramatic, as opposed to comic, performances in recent years—most notably as an awkward son living in the shadow of his successful sculptor father in Noah Baumbach’she seems to be getting even better as he ages. As Stanley, he coasts breezily on a neurotic, self-deprecating cloud—this is a guy who, as the movie opens, is almost too comfortable with his lack of his success. Watching him learn to fight for what he wants is one of the movie’s quiet pleasures.
It’s especially fun to watch Sandler in his scenes with Latifah. Casting these two as husband and wife was an inspired move: Her radiance and warmth provide a kind of force field for him to push against, and to lean into. Latifah is one of those performers who improves every project she appears in. Ideally, she should be in every movie, but we’ll take what we can get.predictable as it may be, motors along efficiently, driven largely by its generosity of spirit. It’s a jump shot that pays off.