Pain Hustlers Is a Goofy Celebration of Greed
The film turns the opioid crisis into a scammer story, not a criminal one.
The opioid crisis is the deadliest drug epidemic in American history—and, of late, irresistible source material for Hollywood. TV shows such as Hulu’s Dopesick and Netflix’s Painkiller explored the rise of Purdue Pharma, the company behind Oxycontin, and its many victims. Crime dramas such as Starz’s Hightown and HBO’s Mare of Easttown, and films such as 2021’s Cherry and 2018’s Little Woods, wove addiction into their storytelling. Opioids have even played a key role in comedies; AMC’s sitcom send-up Kevin Can F**k Himself, for instance, included a plot about orchestrating an accidental overdose.
Some projects have taken a more sensitive approach than others, but for the most part, they portray their subject matter as the staggering tragedy it is. Pain Hustlers, a new addition to the genre that begins streaming Friday on Netflix, takes a different tack. Directed by David Yates, who’s best known for shepherding the back half of the Harry Potter movies and all three Fantastic Beasts entries, the film blithely uses the epidemic to dress up an otherwise-familiar rags-to-riches story. The result is a tasteless endeavor that transforms the prescription-drug crisis into a flashy cartoon—a purported dissection of a broken system that takes too lighthearted a tone.
Based on Evan Hughes’s book of the same title (which built on his New York Times reporting), Pain Hustlers liberally fictionalizes the story of Insys Therapeutics, a company that used shady tactics to flood the market with its fentanyl product. The movie renames or invents most of its characters, including the protagonist, Liza (played by Emily Blunt), a single mom and former stripper who begins working for a failing pharmaceutical start-up. She turns the company’s prospects around by building on a racketeering scheme that involves “speaker programs,” which are—actually, you don’t really need the details, do you?
After all, Pain Hustlers barely cares about how Zanna—the film’s version of Insys—could so easily exploit the American health-care system. It’s much more preoccupied with deploying tricks from the playbooks of The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street to emphasize the company’s excess: We get copious slow-motion close-ups of the Zanna team’s over-the-top parties, frenzied montages of attractive sales reps luring doctors into prescribing their drug, and a barrage of cheeky, fourth-wall-breaking voice-overs from Liza. These sequences are meant to underline the dizzying and disgusting nature of Zanna’s rise, but the effect is overwhelming. The film comes off instead like a goofy celebration of greed.
Worse, the film struggles to make its characters more than caricatures. Apart from Liza, who becomes more and more troubled by how easily she can justify the company’s wrongdoings for her own financial gain, Pain Hustlers seems uninterested in examining how Zanna employees may have wrestled with their product turning patients into addicts. There’s Pete (Chris Evans), a salesman whose entire purpose is being as profane as possible. There’s Dr. Lydell (Brian d’Arcy James), a physician known to accept bribes and overprescribe, and whose baldness turns into a tiresome running gag. And there’s Dr. Jack Neel (Andy Garcia), Zanna’s CEO, a wealthy eccentric and one-note villain.
By the time Pain Hustlers shows a single victim of the company’s success, it’s too late. When Liza learns of a friend’s overdose, the death feels like an afterthought. Not only did the character in question rarely appear, but several extraneous subplots took up most of the screen time. One of them, which follows Liza’s mother, Jackie (Catherine O’Hara, under- and misused), attempts to illustrate Zanna’s toxic workplace culture but goes nowhere. Another, about Liza’s daughter’s non-painkiller-related health struggles, does little more than help maintain the audience’s sympathy for Liza. The film even inserts black-and-white “interviews” with the characters as a way to remind the audience of the real-life stakes of addiction. But these tactics fail to deepen the narrative; they’re distractions, efforts to inject energy into a story that was never meant to be a snarky comedy.
In that sense, perhaps Pain Hustlers isn’t an opioid-crisis project at all, but a scammer story. Recent films and shows in that realm have focused heavily on the misdeeds of start-up culture and social-media savvy swindlers, but the best ones, whatever the subject, understand that the grift is only half of the story. A con’s impact matters just as much as the con itself—who it affected and why it worked can illuminate what impulses and societal ills sustain such schemes. Pain Hustlers overlooks that fact. In the end, the movie acts much like its characters: It diverts the viewer’s attention with gaudy visuals and melodramatic plot points instead of ever coming close to telling a single uncomfortable truth.