Pain Hustlers
NETFLIXThis is a golden moment for cultural products seeking to expose the corruption within the pharmaceutical industry and the potential damages caused by substance abuse, especially relating to the opioid crisis in the USA, with several works delivering unforgettable and impactful critiques, such as Golden-Lion-winner All the Beauty and the Bloodshed or Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Unfortunately, David Yates’ Pain Hustlers is not one of these.
Loosely inspired by the New York Times Magazine article of the same title by Evan Hughes, Pain Hustlers recounts the rise and fall of a company producing and selling prescription drugs through a ruthless – and illegal – scheme. The focus is all on Liza Drake (played by Emily Blunt) and her near-desperate attempts to earn enough money to pay for expensive medical treatments for her ill daughter, which lead her to join sleazy salesman Pete Brenner (Chris Evans) and his impenetrable boss Dr Neel (a lacklustre Andy García).
High stakes and low morals might seem like a perfect combination, and indeed is one that has worked many times before. However, Pain Hustlers never seems to deliver on its premise, instead providing an essentially flat and lifeless rendition of what could (and should) have been a sharp critique of greed, the pain management industry, and capitalist economic structures.
The pacing and editing hardly leave this any room to breathe, overstuffing the narrative to the detriment of depth, both structural and emotional, resolving any and all conflict through fast-paced, jargon-heavy dialogue vaguely reminiscent of The Big Short. The overuse of voiceover and the mockumentary style – with cutaways of black-and-white footage of the actors speaking straight into the camera – never leave the audience any doubt as to the message the film wants to bring home, while leaving ample margin for the characters’ self-delusion and justification of their actions in the name of “a greater good”.
And yet, obvious contradictions abound as the writers engage in an incomprehensible effort to portray Blunt’s character as both a manipulative and shrewd saleswoman willing to cut corners to obtain what she wants and a wide-eyed idealist who truly believes in the goodness of the product she is peddling, only seeking to help relieve ill people of pain – with her insanely high commission earnings clearly being an incidental, happy accident of her fundamentally altruistic activities. Pain Hustlers’ almost desperate attempts to redeem her character in the eyes of the public right up to the very end appear to convey a rather dubious message while never fully leaning into the darker side of the story and its characters, delivering an ultimately forgettable and bland film tackling a subject on which the creative industry has much better to offer.