Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson's new comedy The Hustle hasn't gone down too well with the critics, with early reviews slating it as "empty" and "cheap".

The film – which is a gender-flipped adaptation of the Michael Caine and Steve Martin classic Dirty Rotten Scoundrels – sees Hathaway and Wilson play a pair of scam artists, one high class and the other classless, who attempt to con a number of rich men.

But unfortunately for the new pairing, the critics have this one down as more of a tragedy than a comedy.

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Here's what the reviews are saying:

"Anne Hathaway detonates a megaton blast of pure unfunniness in this terrifying film. She leaves behind a mushroom cloud of anti-humour, reducing every laugh possibility to grey-white ash in a postapocalyptic landscape of horror and despair."

"To say that I didn’t laugh once during The Hustle would be factually accurate, yet it doesn’t quite capture the strength and intensity of the not-laughing I was doing throughout. Here is a comedy so relentlessly and violently toe-curling that I left the cinema walking like one of the velociraptors that clacks along the kitchen worktops at the end of Jurassic Park."

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"Those looking for a sharply feminist reinvention of this tale will have to wait another couple of decades. The Hustle is a beat-for-beat Scoundrels copy in which plot points are slavishly reproduced, almost never varying from the last iteration unless technological advances or the changed gender of the protagonists requires it."

"The timing here always seems slightly off. The slapstick sequences – Wilson’s bull in a china shop antics, throwing knives backward, careering into a pommel horse, being dragged behind Hathaway’s bicycle or shooting peasants instead of pheasants – are never quite slick enough."

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"The Hustle flutters and sputters and all too quickly goes splat. Shot nearly two years ago and awaiting a release an unsuspecting public should have been spared. Any comedian will tell you: Don’t let them see you sweat. This movie damn near drowns in perspiration."

"There are a few legitimately great throwaway lines, and a few vaguely offensive ones. But the movie feels so fast and cheap that it’s hard not to wonder why they’ve made it at all, other than to jump on a small and so-far underwhelming trend in gender-swapping ‘80s remakes (see also: Ghostbusters, Overboard)."

"The Hustle goes from a forward-thinking female-centered modern reimagining to a silly, empty, and entirely useless remake."

The Hustle will be in cinemas on Friday (May 10).

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