Title: Pain Hustlers
Describe This Movie In One Point Break Quote:
DALTON: Pain don’t hurt.
Brief Plot Synopsis: It appears the pharmaceutical industry is riddled with fraud.
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 2 Professor Elliss D. Traills out of 5.
Tagline: “She deals your pain.”
Better Tagline: “Get rich while others die tryin.'”
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) is pretty close to rock bottom: dancing at a low-end strip club and living in her sister’s garage with her daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman) and mother Jackie (Catherine O’Hara). It isn’t until Phoebe is diagnosed with a rare brain condition that Liza accepts a job offer from Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a pharma rep whose company, Zanna Therapeutics, is on the edge of bankruptcy.
“Critical” Analysis: America is deep enough into the opioid crisis that nothing in Pain Hustlers is going to be especially revelatory. Directed by Harry Potter mainstay David Yates from Evan Hughes’s bestseller, the movie resembles any number of rags to riches to (better) rags stories, only the setting this time around is Big Pharma instead of Wall Street.
And unlike past efforts to indict (directly or otherwise) the drug business, like Dopesick or Dallas Buyer’s Club, Pain Hustlers is as much a comedy as a movie about an industry responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. It’s really more like Adam McKay (Vice, Don’t Look Up) territory.
Matter of fact, this feels like Yates watched a McKay marathon and decided to try a humorous take on opioid dealers. The editing and shot choices all bring “based on a true story” movies like The Big Short to mind, but it mostly presents as a less accomplished Wolf of Wall Street. Only unlike Jordan Belfort, Liza Drake feels remorse for her victims.
Brenner gives her a shot in spite of her laughable lack of medical qualifications (she quit high school to “pursue sales opportunities”). Maybe he empathizes with her circumstances (ha ha, no) or perhaps he recognizes a fellow hustler when he sees one. In extolling commission over salary, he comes across as a dumber version of Bud from Repo Man.
Events are framed in flashback, so we know Zanna Therapeutics (substituting for real-life counterpart Insys) eventually goes tits up. Back in 2011, however, Liza gets to use her natural adaptability to work her way into the pharma world by charming doctors into selling prescriptions for Zanna’s fentanyl alternative, Lonafen.
You’ll recognize Lexi’s early hustle montage, as countless doors are slammed in her face until — in the midst of taking her epileptic daughter back to her ex — she happens upon her whale (or Free Willy, as Brenner later describes him): a “pain specialist” who turns to Lonafen in desperation over a patient not responding to fentanyl.
After landing that guy, she’s off. Using means both semi-scrupulous and un- (targeting the squirrelly doctors the big firms didn’t want), Liza goes from cutoff shorts to pantsuits, and Zanna goes from the bottom dweller to owning the majority of the market and a record-breaking IPO.
Predictable scenes of excess follow, accompanied by Zanna founder Dr. Neel (Andy Garcia) attaining Howard Hughes levels of neurosis, before Liza realizes the true human coast of Lonafen and attempts to do the right thing by going to the Feds.
Screenwriter Wells Tower (great name, btw) fleshes out the “based on a true story” angle by making Liza (a composite of characters from Hughes’s book) relatable, drawing in numerous storylines while also having a stricken daughter. It’s on Emily Blunt’s shoulders that Pain Hustlers rests, and she almost saves the movie single-handedly.
Because Blunt’s performance is really the only thing to recommend here. Evans enjoys playing unctuous types like Brenner or Ransom Drysdale, and Garcia leans well into creeping weirdness, but Tower’s script is too by-the-numbers, and nothing about Pain Hustlers will linger.
The biggest crime? They made Catherine O’Hara boring.
Pain Hustlers is now streaming on Netflix.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
