Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pain Hustlers’ on Netflix, a ‘Comedy’ About the Opioid Epidemic That Emily Blunt Can’t Salvage

Big Pharma’s sleaziest corners comprise the setting of Pain Hustlers (now streaming on Netflix), a BOATS (Based On A True Story, of course) dram-com that fictionalizes the downfall of Insys Therapeutics, a prescription-drug corp that exercised some dubious-at-best ethics smack in the thick of the opioid crisis. The movie’s notable for being only the second non-Harry Potter-related film in more than a decade-and-a-half for director David Yates, who adapted Evan Hughes’ book The Hard Sell, and cast Emily Blunt and Chris Evans as the pharma reps who start with nothing and end up raking in dough while many other people suffer. Considering the talent involved, this all sounds like a promising two hours, assuming Yates can tightrope-walk between irreverent comedy and the seriousness of the topic, which – review spoiler alert – is apparently easier said than done.

PAIN HUSTLERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We’re privy to a faux-documentary framing device that introduces us to the characters and establishes protagonist Liza Drake (Blunt) as our voiceover narrator – and we won’t mention any of this again, since it’s pretty much extraneous, considering the rest of the movie does a good job of introducing us to the main players here. Now, let’s get to the part of the review where we establish the setting in all-caps: FLORIDA, 2011. Liza drives her POS convertible to the strip joint. Yep, she gyrates against a pole to make ends meet. She’s a divorced single mother who’s essentially homeless, living in her sister’s garage. For now, anyway, because they end up arguing, prompting Liza to truck her meager possessions and teenage daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman) to a grungy roadside motel of the type we saw in The Florida Project. Now, here’s the sobbiest part of her sob story: Phoebe has seizures and is likely to need brain surgery. Liza lies in bed and recites a mantra to herself as the neighbors blast rap music in the wee hours. “I will not give up on myself,” she says quietly. 

Fate intervenes when Pete (Evans) parks himself in the gentlemen’s club, and our alarm bells go off and the red flags flap but Liza is either too entrenched in the fringe lifestyle, or too desperate, to notice. (“Desperate” seems like the bullseye assessment here, but sympathetically so.) Pete’s impressed with her gift of gab, so he gives her his business card and casts out the lure of a six-figure gig. Uh huh. Sure. A guy in a cheap suit gawking at titties offering an employment opportunity? The bulls be shitting, in large quantities. But we already used the “desperate” word, so she trucks over to his office at Zanna Therapeutics, where he’s a rep for a fast-acting under-the-tongue drug that reduces pain in cancer patients. He fakes her resume to say “Ph.D,” although she doesn’t yet know that it’s shorthand for “poor, hungry and dumb” (or “desperate”). She’s hired, and then she learns from the CEO Eric (Amit Shah) and VP Larkin (Jay Duplass) and billionaire owner Dr. Neel (Andy Garcia) that they’re bankrupt as eff. But there’s an opportunity to make a few bucks before the company Titanics into “an iceberg we believe in.”

The gig puts Liza inside strip-mall pain clinics, trying to elbow aside well-established drug de- er, pharma reps, and get doctors to prescribe Zanna’s obviously superior medicine. It’s rough sledding, but then Pete gets to the grift: They’ll bribe the docs, all of whom are just as greedy and sad and balding and pathetic as everyone else, and therefore susceptible to the allure of hair plugs and sports cars. Before you know it, Liza and Pete have turned Zanna from a penny-stock trader to a Fortune 500 corp courting a billion-with-a-b in annual sales. When Liza was struggling to get the medication in one sad person’s mouth and her POS bit the dust, her mother Jackie (Catherine O’Hara) helped out by lending Liza her POS pink Caddy – and now Liza rewards her moms with a Benz and a Zanna sales gig. Liza moves Phoebe into a high-ceilinged apartment with a view of the gulf and her stock options are gonna be worth double-digit millions by the time she’s vested.

But we’re just waiting for the “but” to drop, aren’t we? What with the bribery and sleight-of-hand happening here, Liza knows she’s doing some shady shit. But she soon realizes the meds she’s peddling don’t adhere to the study she touts, claiming it yields a remarkably low rate of addiction. She pulls up to the strip-mall doctor’s office and jittery people are lined up for their scrips, which the doc is tossing out like mini Snickers on Halloween night. Uh, wasn’t Liza supposed to be getting filthy-ass rich helping people? And what we’ve got here is one big ol’ granddaddy of a Crisis Of Conscience. We saw it coming, because Liza isn’t a terrible person, right? 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Last time I saw drug reps delivering zingers, it was Viagra humpers Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway in Love and Other Drugs. And Pain Hustlers is about a billion-with-a-b in debt to The Wolf of Wall Street’s portrait of amoral excess. 

Performance Worth Watching: First things f—ing last: Blunt’s one of the most magnetic screen stars in the business. But even though she finds significant emotional traction in individual moments, this screenplay never gives her a well-defined character to work with.

Memorable Dialogue: Pete and Liza stare down a list of candidates for Zanna sales reps, who include Jackie and a stereotypical blonde bimbo: “You can have the sex toy if I can have my mom,” Liza quips.

Sex and Skin: A fair amount of strip-club skin.

Our Take: Pain Hustlers needs to be razor-sharp to accomplish its apparent goal of being a biting satire cut with poignant melodrama. But it’s not. It’s mushy and malformed, and borderline tactless in the way it depicts myopic greed in the face of human suffering. Case in point: a scene in which a glazed-over cancer-patient-turned-fentanyl-addict (Nick McNeil) spits out his rotten teeth as he tries to sell a car to a customer. It’s played for laughs, and it’s here we notice how Yates struggles mightily to render the grimness of the opioid epidemic as an absurd tragedy. Even the bleakmasters themselves, the Coen Brothers, likely would’ve passed on that premise. 

Scorsese got away with lampooning the American dream with Wolf of Wall Street because the topical inflection point, stock-market skeeze, is a massive target, and isn’t tied to a literal life-and-death epidemic that crosses the rubicon via the exploitation of cancer patients and exposing the often literally fatal flaws of the American healthcare system. (Wall Street is grotesquely corrupt in its trickle-down effects, which is at least an indirect pipeline to human suffering.) Pain Hustlers never tries to characterize pond scum like Pete or a detached eccentric like Neel as anything more than glib caricatures of ethically vacuous greed. We’re too busy being appalled by the fallout of their selfishness and the way capitalism has turned health care into just another money game to laugh at their failures – or to rah-rah Liza’s decision to do the right thing. 

A more serious treatment might’ve done Pain Hustlers some good. But as it stands, it gives us little tossed-off jokes that go splat, moribund third-act sentimentalism, a slick veneer to gloss over its tonal deficiencies and a protagonist who needs more depth and crisper definition along the edges instead of rudimentary Screenplay 101 stuff (a sick child, economic hardship, etc.). And even though we never get a clean sense of Liza’s compelling balance of wiliness and naivete, Blunt still gives the best performance possible considering the troublesome material. The movie is a tale of accountability that fails to convince us that any of this is funny. That’s a hurdle too tall to clear, it seems. 

Our Call: I didn’t buy what Pain Hustlers was hustling. You probably won’t either. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.