A Goodfellas wannabe, that ain't: American Hustle

I know it's an Oscar favorite and a five-star across the board from major daily critics, but I found American Hustle to be long, dull, and confusing. Apparently it's loosely based on the facts and events of the ABSCAM scandal and honestly I would rather it were closely based on those facts and events - I'd like to know more about that event, now washed from (my) memory. As it is, this movie comes across as a Goodfallas wannabe - same era (set in 1978), same loose connection to actual events, punk L.I. hustler turned informant, mob doings set against backdrop of domestic strife, contrast between tough street scene and split-level suburban life, even the Italian-Jewish dynamic - but in any comparison, AH comes up way, way short - not even close to the tension, excitement, humor, and insight of its forebear. I'll say, Bradley Cooper and a few of the other leads (Louis CK) do a good job with what they've got; Jennifer Lawrence always brings something to any film she's in. I do admire attempts to cast against type, but then the miscast actor has to surprise us and show us they can carry it off - Amy Adams is so badly miscast from the get-go as a small-time grifter that she throws the whole film off track. The plot is a mess, so many betrayals and and stings it's hard to keep it straight and finally do we care? Not really, because we, or at least I, don't buy into the characters - the FBI agent who falls for the moll, the small-time hoodlum able to scam numerous mokes in a loan-shark scheme (people paying him a $5k finder's fee to get them a $50k loan - are you kidding me? No one would do business with this guy - he's so obviously a con artist). I know there's a sucker born every minute, but still ... And the final sting - when the FBI is hoist on its own petard so to speak - well, won't give it away but will just say that M. saw through the flaws in it in about 2 seconds - yet nobody in the movie was able to smell a rat? Movie does a good job re-creating the 70s era - the hair, the glitz, the music, the dancing - but who really wants to go back there anyway? There might be a 90-minute OK entertaining movie lurking inhere somewhere, but in its aspirations and its attempt to be the definitive gangster movie of our time this film so over-reaches and is so jumpy and disjointed, with little continuity from scene to scene - J Lawrence starts off as an agoraphobic stay-at-home mom and before we know it she's flirting w/ mobsters in a club, Jersey politician supposed to be smart and shrewd and powerful and believes this two-bit gangster is clean and his best friend and working in the interest of his constituents, and I could go on - that by the end I was completely uninterested and numb with boredom. Goodfellas may be too violent for some, for many in fact - but I'd watch it again any day and cannot say the same for American Hustle, sorry.