In the subgenre of “big business breaks bad” docudramas, there are two tiers: The movies that define the form, and the movies that desperately want to be those movies. That first tier is the territory occupied by The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street; slick, over-the-top tales of how money-hungry jerks got rich by screwing over working-class Americans. The second tier is packed with movies you’d be hard-pressed to name, because they’re so concerned with copying the style of Martin Scorsese or Adam McKay that they fail to make an impression on their own. This is where Pain Hustlers lives.
Based on Evan Hughes’ book of the same name, Pain Hustlers sees director David Yates and screenwriter Wells Tower attempt to copy Wolf of Wall Street’s pop bacchanal of sex, booze and greed as they explore the world of pharmaceutical sales and its role in the opioid crisis. Unfortunately, familiar images of flashy excess aren’t a substitute for interesting filmmaking. There’s nothing here about the subject you couldn’t learn in a third of the time (or less!) from other sources.
Pain Hustlers’ protagonist/audience surrogate is Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), a Tampa-area divorced mom living with her sister and dancing at a strip club to make ends meet. While at work, she meets Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a rep for a flailing pharma startup with a supposedly revolutionary, fentanyl-based cancer pain drug. Desperate to make a better life for herself and her daughter (Chloe Coleman), Liza joins Brenner’s startup, Zanna. She quickly proves to be a skilled saleswoman, taking the company from the brink of failure to a successful public offering in under a year.
You see where this is going, right? Things go well until they don’t. The sudden success leads to wild parties and obscene profits, which leads to increasing eccentricities and unethical demands from the company’s founder (Andy Garcia), which leads to a push for increased prescriptions, which leads to patient addiction, which leads to whistleblowing and a legal meltdown. Friends become enemies, trusted colleagues become informants, personal morals are compromised.
The Wolf of Wall Street made this narrative arc interesting by populating it with bizarre characters and tall tales of debauchery that had to be seen to be believed. The Big Short used sly fourth-wall addresses and informational breakdowns that made its dense subject matter easier to understand. Pain Hustlers is content with a documentary-style framing device (that never quite connects to the rest of the story) and shots from cinematographer George Richmond that rarely try anything more ambitious than a medium close-up. The film’s editing from Mark Day is sluggish during montages when it should be fast and rhythmic, and erratic in scenes that call for fluid movement rather than quick cuts.
All this contributes to Pain Hustlers’ uneven pacing, which is more boring than anything else. Occasionally, you’ll get a flash of “huh?” like when, during a conversation with her boss, Liza has a vision of another pharma company’s recent failure. It blips across the screen so fast that you’d be forgiven for thinking there was something wrong with your streaming device. None of it is helped by one-note characters. Shortly after a hiring blitz of attractive young reps, Pete tells Liza he’s gotten one of them pregnant. He names the woman, but these characters are all so interchangeable he may as well never have bothered.
Any actual information about the pharmaceutical industry that Pain Hustlers includes can easily be found in one of the many other opioid crisis-related dramas on the market, several of which do a much more holistic job of exploring the damage fentanyl (and capitalism) has caused. The gross world of pharmaceutical speaker programs, bribes to doctors and wining-and-dining sales conferences is hardly groundbreaking territory; Last Week Tonight covered it comprehensively back in 2015, as did numerous other shows, news outlets and books.
There’s not anything in Pain Hustlers that’s worth your valuable time. Better-told versions of its story abound. More thoughtful takes on the opioid industry and the harm it causes everyday people are plentiful. Shorter and sweeter explainers of pharmaceutical sales and marketing to doctors exist in droves. It may well be that Yates and his filmmaking team knew all this going in, and decided to sleepwalk their way through the process. It certainly feels that way. But that doesn’t mean you need to bother with the lackluster result.
Director: David Yates
Writer: Wells Tower
Starring: Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Andy García, Catherine O’Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d’Arcy James, Chloe Coleman
Release Date: October 27, 2023 (Netflix)
Abby Olcese is an entertainment writer based in Kansas City. Her work has appeared at /Film, rogerebert.com, Crooked Marquee, Sojourners Magazine, and Think Christian. You can follow her adventures and pop culture obsessions at @abbyolcese.