Stars like Emily Blunt and Chris Evans have carefully created the public persona of being kind and gracious people — through prior roles, interviews, and chat show appearances. Doubtless, it is not just good PR — they are genuinely lovely people. But the image created is so strong that either due to limitations of the material at hand or their own acting abilities – they are unable to dispel that notion and truly inhibit diverse characters. That is the consequence in “Pain Hustlers,” Nextflix’s Big Pharma satire, where Blunt & Evans play greed-infested, destructive & harmful assholes — and can’t help coming across as entirely unconvincing and miscast.
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The whiff of play-acting hangs over the entire enterprise as even director David Yates seems entirely unsuited to the material, and the whole project seems misconceived and half-baked from top to bottom. That shouldn’t take away anything from the subject, which is of paramount importance. The devastation wrought by heartless pharma execs and corrupt doctors (and politicians) by purposefully perpetrating the opioid crisis is well-established. Millions have lost their lives while these companies and doctors have lined their pockets by looting the public. Crafting a limp “The Wolf Of Wall Street” rip-off to tell this story is a missed opportunity.
“Pain Hustlers” follows Scorsese’s Wall Street high rollers drama almost beat for beat. Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), over the course of the film, narrates how, from modest circumstances, she went on to become a wealthy and powerful individual. Along the way, she assembles a team of young, unscrupulous sales agents to expand the company. There are wild parties and much bribing, law-breaking, and wrong-doing. Followed by the eventual downfall, conviction, and jail time once the feds get on their tail. Chris Evans and Andy Garcia play Drake’s superiors at the same company and suffer similar consequences.
The inefficacy of this templatized plot structure is compounded by the fact that Drake is a fictional character, and all the events are largely fictionalized despite being based on real events. “Pain Hustlers” is adapted from a 2018 New York Times Magazine article by Evan Hughes and his subsequent 2022 non-fiction book “The Hard Sell.” The real-life figures in Hughes’ work are replaced with amalgamations, and this abstraction drains the story of much of its dramatic import. Nothing consequential seems at stake when the entire narrative seems designed to deliver pat Hollywood trajectories and conclusions.
Having fictional characters is not necessarily a problem — but they are so sketchily defined in “Pain Hustlers” that their eventual fate is not of much interest anyway. If the movie had portrayed the real-life criminals involved, audiences would at least have the satisfaction of seeing them jailed and humbled. Evans & Blunt try their damnedest but cannot shake off the feeling that they are merely cosplaying as evil execs. Such is their public persona that even the frequent swear words sound unnatural from their mouths.
Blunt is a movie star and is always a performer worth watching. But the role needed a more hard-boiled performer to make it even halfway believable. Blunt’s ingratiating screen image would have you sympathize with even a pharma exec who caused an opioid crisis and destroyed countless lives. Surely, that is a failure of characterization. Is Blunt to be relegated to playing silly parlor games with Jimmy Fallon on late-night TV? She’s capable of much more and better material, and less vanity would help.
Assembling a film of the nature of “The Wolf Of Wall Street” or “The Big Short” — zingy scam stories requiring elaborate cross-cutting, several inserts, and an explanation of jargony concepts is a particular skill. On the evidence of “Pain Hustlers,” it is unclear if director David Yates has it. It is a perplexing choice of material for a filmmaker whose last 8 films each cost about 200 million dollars and were designed to be large-scale global blockbusters. Some of those films are better than good, but this sudden lurch into satire territory makes it seem like he missed a couple of turns along the way.
“Pain Hustlers” is mercifully brief and clips along at a mostly nimble pace. It will likely still do numbers for Netflix for all of two days and then fade away into obscurity — just like the pile of content shoveled daily into the furnace of streaming. Perhaps audiences mildly intrigued by this shallow parable of greed will seek out other shows and movies that deal more substantially with the Opioid Crisis and Big Pharma – among them Hulu’s” Dopesick” and Laura Poitras’ “All The Beauty And The Bloodshed.” [C-]
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