Pain Hustlers review: Netflix’s Emily Blunt opioid drama mixes its meds

How can you make an opioid crisis movie fun? Are you able to? If you are interested in learning more about the Should you? The answer to these questions — as proposed by director David Yates (emerging from Harry Potter jail, where he’s been since the mid-2000s), screenwriter Wells Tower, star Emily Blunt, and Netflix — is Pain HustlersThe film is a dramatized pharmaceutics that mixes a serious, relatable movie about a social issue with the seductive excesses of an adolescent Scorsese true-crime rollercoaster. The film is a success, but only to an extent. Blunt’s performance is strong, as usual. Pain Hustlers The film is entertaining, even if its dramatic elements tend to cancel out.

Tower based his screenplay on Evan Hughes’ 2018 New York Times article and subsequent book about how, in the 2010s, a small pharmaceutical company played its way into the big leagues — and then into racketeering charges and bankruptcy — on the back of powerful, fentanyl-based opioid painkiller Subsys, which it effectively bribed doctors into prescribing. However, Pain HustlersIt is a heavily fictionalized work. Tower changed all the names in the book and moved the action to Florida. Yates was able to conjure up scenes of fluorescent desolation, trailer park desolation, and a horror movie. The character Liza Drake, played by Blunt, is a single mother in a tough situation. Liza’s desperate financial situation is resolved by a job selling a Subsys like drug, but it leads her straight into moral turmoil.

Liza is brassy, passionate, street-smart, and empathetic, and she seems quite clearly inspired by real-life crusader Erin Brockovich, as played by Julia Roberts in Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 legal drama about a working-class woman battling a corporation that’s poisoning people at the bottom of the food chain. Liza is a shrewd, street-smart woman who fights a corporation that poisons people at the bottom of the food chain. You can also read about how to get in touch with us. serves as a Jordan Belfort type — Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf on Wall StreetThe definitive film about the sales culture. Like Belfort, she’s designed to give us a vicariously thrilling insider glimpse at how this murky world works.

Image: Brian Douglas/Netflix

Working a shift at a strip club, Liza bumps into Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a sales rep for Zanna, a pharma startup that’s failing to claw its way into the market with its fast-acting fentanyl formulation that users spray under their tongues (called Lonafen in the film). She is hired after he recognizes her ability to understand people and give them what they need.

When she accepts, partly out of worry about paying the medical bills for her daughter, who has epilepsy, Pete juices up her CV with fake medical qualifications and presents it to Zanna’s eccentric founder, Jack Neel (Andy García). But first, he scrawls the letters “PHD” in the corner. Liza protests that she didn’t even finish high school, but it turns out this is code for exactly how Zanna likes its salespeople: “poor, hungry, and dumb.”

Liza’s intelligence and charm are a perfect match for Pete’s brutality. Her ingenuity and charm interlock perfectly with Pete’s ruthlessness. She swiftly climbs the ladder, saving the company by persuading Pete to let her create a low-rent version of the “speaker programs” other pharma companies use to recruit doctors to prescribe their products. At these boozy, sponsored away-days, key doctors are paid to deliver a speech to their peers — and to fellow clients. They’re a disguised form of kickback that operates in a legal gray area; Pete describes the programs as “doing 67 in a 65 zone,” and says the perpetrating companies will only earn a slapped-wrist fine if they’re found out.

Photo: Brian Douglas/Netflix

Wholesale bribery isn’t the end of it, though. The time period when Pain Hustlers is set, fentanyl-based drugs are only legal as pain relief for late-stage cancer patients, since the drugs’ dangerously addictive qualities aren’t a primary concern in those cases. Neel, however, wants his business to continue growing. That means new markets, which means talking doctors into pushing these potent opiates at patients who don’t need them. Liza faces an ethical crisis after a series of overdoses.

Pain Hustlers requires a series of pretty ungainly gear-shifts from Blunt, and it’s a testament to her magnetism and brilliant command of tone that she manages them so smoothly. It’s as much of a pleasure to watch her trade barbs with her mom (Catherine O’Hara) in a seedy motel room as it is to observe her slick wheeling and dealing in a series of eye-popping power suits, or to go from there to tearful moral awakening.

Evans stumbles behind her, miscast. That’s not because this shameless, amoral role asks him to subvert his heroic Captain America persona. He played a part in Knives OffThe same thing was done, which made for a hilariously flippant heel-turn. But Pain HustlersThis secretly subtle actor is not suited to loud music. He has some of the best scenes in Blunt when Pete, in an attempt to change their relationship in a more romantic direction, is rejected by Liza.

Photo: Brian Douglas/Netflix

It’s odd that for a film about salespeople the filmmakers worked so hard to perfect their pitch. Pain HustlersIt undervalues the cost to human life of the epidemic. A few peripheral characters overdosing can’t begin to describe the way this corporately engineered epidemic of drug addiction laid waste to entire communities, even (and especially) after the crackdown on prescription opioids drove then hopelessly dependent populations toward heroin use. (If you can stomach it, check out “Heroin Town,” the first episode of Louis Theroux’s documentary series Dark StatesThe documentary examines the effects of the crisis in one West Virginian city. It’s an hour of television you will never forget.)

It does reveal the corruption and unchecked exploitation that goes on in the American pharmaceutical industry. (Insys, the company that inspired the film, perhaps pushed things too far and paid the price, but the practice of “speaker programs” is apparently still widespread.) Tower’s script has so much empathy for its characters — including the hustling sales reps and even a corrupt pain doctor played by Brian d’Arcy James — that it naturally turns the spotlight on the morally bankrupt capitalist ecosystem that exploits them all.

Yates keeps the film pacy, despite the fact that he is clearly happy to be leaving behind the Wizarding World after seven Harry Potter films and Fantastic Beasts. The director seems to be exercising muscles he hasn’t used since directing the classic 2003 British miniseries State of the PlayThe same sinuous thrill with a conscious.

It would be impossible to achieve the same results if Pain Hustlers didn’t bring its perspective inside the seedy pharma sales machine that powered a human catastrophe. But in Liza’s final-act awakening, the filmmakers try to have their cake and eat it too, and in the process, they scrub away most of the story’s complexity and resonance. The filmmakers do not commit to either a Scorsese-style ride through the dark heart of hell, or to Erin Brockovich’s clear-sighted crusade. The blending of conflicting ideologies makes this movie half as good and morally weightless as either of them. But still, Pain Hustlers is a fun watch that also elucidates one of the darkest spasms of modern American capitalism, and that’s something. It’s a great selling point.

Pain HustlersNetflix has the latest episodes available.