'Pain Hustlers' Lets Emily Blunt Tear Big Pharma a New One (2024)

Liza Drake is a single mother, a part-time stripper, and a full-time hustler. She has to be, given that she’s stuck in Florida in the year of our lord 2011, trying to figure out the next step for her and her daughter, Phoebe. On the plus side, Liza has grit, determination and some serious powers of persuasion, which come in handy when she needs to, say, negotiate with a school principal about Phoebe’s punishment for almost burning down the building. (The principal wants to suspend her for three days; Liza talks her down to one day and a warning.)

That gift of gab also comes in handy when she’s chatting up a guy lounging at the bar of the club where she dances. His name is Pete Brenner. Liza correctly sizes him up as a pharmaceutical rep. He drunkenly offers her a job. It’s at a cut-rate startup, selling a painkiller called Lonafin that works twice as fast as fentanyl but only has one-tenth the market penetration. Kind of a dead-end gig, really. Who knows if the business is even going to last the week, much less financial quarter?

Because she’s desperate, however, Liza shows up at his office and calls his bluff. She wants the job. She needs the job. And because she’s played by Emily Blunt, who’s added “thoughtful mama grizzly,” “can-do woman of action” and “person with slowly cracking moral compass who you still root for regardless” to her repertoire of character specialties, you know that she will convince this slippery Pete to give it to her. A sales position that requires her to get doctors to write prescriptions for their miracle product by any/every means necessary doesn’t seem like much, commissions or not. Luckily for her and Pete, there’s an opioid crisis looming on the horizon that’s about to make their painkiller extremely desirable and make them extremely rich.

Blunt is not the only reason to see Pain Hustlers, a social-issues drama masquerading as a satirical sideswipe at a corporately sponsored epidemic, or maybe it’s the other way around. (It hits Netflix on October 27th.) But she is the main reason to sit through this uneasy, sometimes queasy take on America’s addiction to drugs and success, not in that order. Nothing against Chris Evans, who plays her co-conspirator in selling this literal opioid to the masses with the same sleazed-up, toxic sense of entitlement that’s becoming a hallmark of his post-Marvel image rehabilitation. (See also: Knives Out, The Gray Man.) Or Catherine O’Hara, Andy Garcia, Brian d’Arcy James and Chloe Coleman, all of whom do bang-up work as Liza’s mother, the company’s dubious founder, an ethics-free doctor, and Liza’s daughter, respectively. Or David Yates, a director best known for directing the solid back half of the Harry Potter series and, er, worst known for also directing the franchise’s Fantastic Beasts prequels that followed.

It’s just that, in liberally adapting Ethan Hughes’ New York Times Magazine article about the narco-capitalism boom that helped fuel our current crisis (the same article that led to his 2022 book on the subject, The Hard Sell), the filmmakers and screenwriter Wells Tower have created a composite female character designed to be our Virgil through the Sunshine State’s seven circles of supply-and-dependency hell. And that means that Blunt, who’s also one of the film’s producers, makes the most of the plum role as Liza goes from a newbie dropped into the world of pay-for-play physicians to a master of it. Everyone knows it’s a cliché to praise actors who can let you see what they’re thinking onscreen. Yet Blunt has honed a true talent for communicating not just thought processes but a constantly calibrating, constantly evolving emotional intelligence by simply holding a stare too long, shifting her gaze slightly, speaking a little too quickly or a little too deliberately. (And in this case, doing so in a flatter-than-flat Southeastern accent with the slightest lilt of Floridian twang.)

That gift comes in very handy in Pain Hustlers, and not just because it deepens Blunt’s performance as a woman constantly sizing up situations ranging from dodgy to dangerous and reacting on her feet. It also helps distinguish the movie from a thousand other similar rise-and-fall parables that strive to neither glamorize nor demonize the bad things behind the good life, and somehow always end up doing both. Unlike similar dramatizations of the subject such as Netflix’s limited series Painkiller, there’s no mural-like attempt to get at the opioid crisis from a variety of different narrative strands.

Instead, this follows the Goodfellas template of a tour guide taking us through illegal activities — “speaker program” scams, bribing doctors, skirting regulatory rules, playing up false marketing info to push more pills — until the hangover of accountability and arrests begin to kick in. There are, naturally, plenty of pit stops for debauchery and demented behavior along the way; feel free to mark “montage of sex-booze-and-coke bacchanalia” and “Blunt doing shots while a mermaid swims in her pool and ‘Turn Down for What’ plays on the soundtrack” on your bingo cards.

There’s also an awakening of a conscience, as the crisis begins to metastasize on a national level at the same time as Lonafin’s target demos in Florida exponentially multiply. Liza’s motives were always pure-ish — the kid needs surgery, plus she’s not as greedy as those grifters running private schools — though the script keeps stacking things in her favor just to be on the safe side. (Check off “tearful courtroom speech” on that bingo card as well.) Blunt manages to stave off the feeling that the movie expects her to go completely Saint Liza by the end, and still gets to tear Big Pharma a new one.

Yet the more Liza realizes she’s gotta blow the whistle to atone for her sins, the less stable Pain Hustlers is at balancing its finger-wagging with waving its roof-raising hands in the air. It doesn’t want to lecture you on how corporate greed funded a lot of death, though it’s happy to underline that point at every chance (“We weren’t Purdue!” Pete says defensively, and you can still hear the faintest trace of envy in his voice). It does want you to feel horrible about the loss of life while presenting it through the filter of a warped, irony-saturated Horatio Alger story, however, and that’s where the wild ride of it all gets too bumpy for its own good. These sales people are hustling meds in the name of chasing after that elusive myth known as the American Dream and created chaos in their wake. The movie itself ends up just hustling a stock redemption story window-dressed with issues as opposed to exploring them.