Movie Review: American Hustle

To my luck I missed watching American Hustle in the UK by mere days and therefore spent weeks in Kuwait waiting for its release. Unless you’ve been living under a rock or something, American Hustle has been making quite a fuss and has been depicted as the best movie of the 2013, with an award winning and star-studded cast that makes it more alluring to watch than ever.

I’m usually skeptic when one too many of stars appear in one movie as somehow the movie seems to depend on their stardom to float rather than on the movie script or event themselves. I am also wary of movies that are Oscar nominated, not always do they watch into something I’d enjoy watching myself. However, I did want to watch American Hustle so very much and with such a delayed release I thought it was going to be skipped in Kuwait all together but, at last, last Thursday it finally made it into the cinemas and I wasted no time watching it.

I’m so sad I went though.

The movie is set in the late 70′s and early 80′s and is inspired from real live events that did happen in the USA when on an FBI operation that used two con artists and a fake Middle Eastern Sheikh to catch several corrupt politicians in the act accepting bribes and such. The movie is well made, it did feel like the 80′s and although I enjoyed my childhood in the 80′s very much, I think the adult world was quite a depressing place especially the fashion, cringe-worthy on all levels! All of the stars, especially Christian Bale was amazing and I don’t think he was donning a fat suit for the part, I read somewhere that he actually gained 50 pounds for the role!

I cannot, however, state an opinion I couldn’t form on the movie itself for I didn’t watch it, not really. What I watched was “shredded clips” put together where you had to guess the other side of the conversation between the actors and scenes of a “fake sheikh” from the middle east which we knew existed in the movie but weren’t allowed to see because of our censorship. However, we were treated to Robert Deniro speaking Arabic and particularly Khaleeji dialect saying “’3ashmara” and “Gool li shrayek”. It was quite funny!

I’ve had it with the censorship on movies, this is unacceptable on all levels! What they’ve done to American Hustle is a disgrace and if whatever they decided to cut is so offensive and feels best for our own “values and virtues” then I’d rather they had banned the movie all together and not show it in the first place. There is no point watching something that cannot be understood and actually paying money for it! Is it just me or as of 2014 the censorship has grown more ruthless and aggressive? 50 minutes cut out of The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t normal! Had I known that American hustle was going to be an American Shawerma a la Kuwaiti Style, I wouldn’t have bothered either. I think its the responsibility of the cinema companies in Kuwait to actually let us know how much of a movie is chopped off before we purchase tickets, this is the least they can do in light of how bad the censorship is growing these days.

Would I watch it again? Well, I left the cinema with quite a bad taste in my mouth and I thought American Hustle was the kind of movie you watch once and is better watched in the cinema but, just to spite the censorship in Kuwait, I am going to buy a copy and keep it on my DVD shelf, UNCUT. Do not go watch it in Kuwait if you value your sanity, wait a couple more weeks for the DVD is going to be out on March 18th.