Okay let me get this straight. You hate this movie because they have the word Hustle in the title but don't show them pulling a stunt like the Oceans Series. I will come to Oceans series a bit later on.
If you saw the show The Real Hustle or even if you didn't Hustle simply means fraud. Considering these guys were frauds and that is what they were doing and the entire 'Abscam' operation was a huge scam I think the title is justified. One doesn't walk into a Cinema Hall expecting a movie like 'The Italian Job' or 'Oceans Eleven' just by looking at the title.
This is the thing that I liked about the movie they didn't waste time showing the small time hustles. They were con artists conning people and that was all that was to be known. The movie was about how the FBI used these Con artists to bait and catch the bigger fishes and that bit was done well. The movie of course isn't a religious retelling of what really happened considering they changed a few bits of the real story to make the movie less grim but they didn't go overboard to include an elaborate plan just to entice people.
Movies like Oceans Series, The Italian Job, Fast and Furious Series, Transporter Series etc., seem to have just one story to tell and one Job to pull and when you have to do that you need to make it big to woo everyone. Even then Oceans Twelve was bad and Thirteen was so-so. The same can be said about Transporter series. The Italian Job overall was okay and the less said the better it is for F&F series. In none of these movies do we see characters grow or the plot deviate from what it starts out to do.
American Hustle is loosely based on 'Abscam' and it's participants in which nothing spectacular like what you see in Oceans series happened. It was just a sting operation.
By the way @
rdst_1 if you haven't seen 'Inside Man' don't see it expecting something like 'Infernal Affairs' or a biological movie just because the title suggests something like it. The movie 'Inside Man' is far from it and yes you might find it boring but it is one of the best movies if you can watch it in it's entirety.