Sailing into theaters on May 10, The Hustle promises a splashy romp in the French Riviera with two experienced, albeit very different, con women at the forefront. A female-driven remake of 1988’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Hustle is a comedy two-hander starring Rebel Wilson and Anne Hathaway. As Penny and Josephine, respectively, Wilson and Hathaway replace Scoundrel’s Steve Martin and Michael Caine. Their characters retain the louche qualities of their predecessors while also providing a fresh angle on the film’s premise: Two con artists join forces in the south of France to bleed the wealthy dry. Things go pretty well until the two take on a job that could finally lead to their con being revealed.

The Hustle promises lots of comedy as Josephine (Hathaway) tries to turn Penny (Wilson) from a low-brow, low-stakes con artist into a woman truly at the top of her game. Expect lots of training montages and pathetically easy targets to drift into Josephine and Penny’s view before they meet a tech millionaire (Alex Sharp) who could be their biggest get yet. But what makes The Hustle so uniquely suited for its recasting as a female-led project is the way in which it founds its premise on two women being allowed to turn the tables on their male targets, capitalizing on outdated patriarchal beliefs that women are weak or vulnerable and using it to secure a payday.

Three of Josephine’s lines in The Hustle’s trailer confirm this timely theme as well as the reboot’s updated thesis. During Josephine and Penny’s first extended conversation at Josephine’s home (an almost exact replica of the scene from Scoundrel’s when Lawrence, played by Caine, details the nature of his con artist schtick to new partner Freddy, played by Martin). At the beginning of the conversation, Josephine asks Penny, “Penny, why are women better suited to the con than men?” going on to say, “Because no man will ever believe a woman is smarter than he is.” Later in the same conversation, Josephine teaches Penny the first rule of being a top-notch con artist: “First lesson: there is nothing more compelling to a man than a vulnerable woman.”

The final line from Josephine ties it all together as she tells Penny, “Men always underestimate us, and that is what we use.”

The Hustle is essentially the same story as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels but it has shied away from simply stunt casting two women as an easy way to liven up a reboot by finding real meat on the bones on the idea that two women can successfully con  men by exploiting men for underestimating them — a very real and very troubling thing that is still happening in 2019. In this way, The Hustle allows two women to luxuriate and benefit from finding a loophole in the system. There’s a way that they can turn the tables on men with men even knowing it. While the film likely doesn’t want women seeing this film to actually commit crimes, there is an empowering aspect to seeing two female characters understand the finer points of a firmly-intact, global patriarchy at the highest socioeconomic levels and mastering routes into that tier of the class system in order to take what they want in a twisted, Robin Hood kinda way. Listen, it’s not perfect and it’s not free from critique about its methodology, but The Hustle’s confidence in the feminist lens through which it filters Scoundrels’ original premise is pretty damn genius.

The Hustle is just the last example in a recent trend of the clever way re-angling a rebooted story can modernize it and serve as important cultural commentary for the time it’s made in. Consider Ocean’s 8 and 2016’s Ghostbusters. Both of these films were reboots with premises near-copies of the original films they were rebooting (2001’s Ocean’s 11 and 1984’s Ghostbusters) but utilized all-female leading casts with slightly tweaked and updated story details so that they felt properly updated and suited to the female characters embedded within them.

Similar to The Hustle, Ocean’s 8 brought together a group of women, led by lifelong con artist Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock), who plan to steal rare, valuable jewels during the annual Met Gala. Debbie’s believes her plan is rock solid, telling her team that they can pull it off because nobody will be looking at a bunch of women when a heist of this magnitude goes down. Granted, these women are also pros in their particular roles within the heist, so their sex plays a part rather than a whole of their ability to get away with their crime. These women understand the rules of the heist game, they know what’s at stake, and best of all, they have all the confidence in the world rooted deep into their consciousness that keeps them emboldened even when things get dicey.

Ghostbusters, on the other hand, presents us with four women who have been shut out from traditional paths in their chosen career fields (see: scientists Erin, played by Kristen Wiig, and Abby, played by Melissa McCarthy, as well as nuclear engineer Jillian, played by Kate McKinnon) or find themselves in need of a way to channel their particular set of skills (that’s be Patty, played by Leslie Jones). These are women who know their shit and want to make good use of it but are set off on a course they never thought possible — that’d be the ghost-busting — in order to put their knowledge to good use. Along the way, pretty much every man that stands in their way is proven to be a special kind of stupid (except for their adorable receptionist, Kevin, played by Chris Hemsworth) that paints them as ignorant and insipid as they are big, fleshy obstacles keeping the women from getting their work done. Thankfully, teamwork and an understanding of how to work around those dolts works in the group’s advantage to save the day.

Back to The Hustle. As a final note, it’s worth reminding you that the biggest fly in The Hustle’s thematic ointment is that two white women are committing these high stakes cons. Some members of the Ocean’s 8 crew ostensibly risked closer scrutiny for their activities solely because they are women of color and Jones being the only black Ghostbuster was the source of more than one unsavory racial joke or crude caricature about black women. The ways in which race benefits the power plays of these women should serve as reminder that this is ideas that women can subvert a repressive patriarchy in order to get the power and success they seek is worth pursuing, but hopefully future films can take a more intersectional approach that regards every kind of female viewpoint sensitively.

That said, The Hustle is a tantalizing, frothy update on a classic comedy that brings interesting ideas to the table. If you want to get away from genre fare at the box office this summer but still find a film with interesting ideas, this just might be the film for you.

Get your tickets for The Hustle here.