Pain Hustlers review: Big pharma satire is a hard pill to swallow

It’s been a long 13 years since Love & Other Drugs made Jake Gyllenhaal’s pharma rep the lovable half of a teary rom-com couple. These days, such characters are more likely to be found in a film like Pain Hustlers, a satire that wants to serve as a righteous indictment of a pharmaceutical industry that’s long put profits over patient’s health and well-being. But in trying to give us a portrait of money-driven reps eager to cross ethical and legal lines to pad their pockets and those of their bosses, Harry Potter director David Yates reduces his protagonist to a familiar heroine we’re expected to understand, and even root for.

Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) is a single mother whose world turns upside down when, while working at a strip joint, she meets smarmy pharma rep Pete Brenner (Chris Evans). Pete’s in dire need of better marketing for the fast-acting fentanyl-based drug Lonafin, something the charming and desperate Liza is all too happy to help him with. After all, if she doesn’t, she’ll lose the chance to finally do right by her daughter. And as a scene early in the film shows us, nothing motivates Liza as much as the need to protect her daughter, Phoebe (Chloe Coleman): When the teenager is nearly expelled from school for starting a fire, Liza manages to negotiate her punishment to a manageable three-day suspension. Her charm knows no bounds; she’s a perfect salesperson, and a perfect match for Pete, who’s all too happy to rewrite her resume so she gets hired.

At a time when films like Ben Is Back and All The Beauty And The Bloodshed–not to mention TV shows like Dopesick and Netflix’s own Painkiller–are forcing audiences to see the opioid crisis as a wake-up call to the greed that drives the American health care industry, Pain Hustlers opts to provide a more colorful (read: funnier) take on this issue. Tone-wise, it wants to stand alongside films like The Wolf Of Wall Street, The Big Short, and Dumb Money (not to mention Hustlers). The story of Liza Drake, set as it is against corporate greed and craven racketeering schemes, is pitched as a wholly American one, as farcical as it is tragic. Desperation, as Pete’s kooky boss Dr. Neel (Andy Garcia) tells Liza at one point, is a hell of a motivator, one meant to push you to do the unthinkable. Sure, Liza’s motivations may be well-intentioned (she wants to care for her daughter and cover her ever-increasing medical expenses) but that plot device has the undue effect of flagrantly short-circuiting our sympathies.

By the time Liza is knowingly bribing doctors and turning a blind eye toward the push to foist Lonafin on non-cancer patients, Pain Hustlers turns into a portrait of a mother at her wits’ end who must stand for something lest she lose the family she was so eager to support. Screenwriter Wells Tower, working from Evan Hughes’ book The Hard Sell: Crime And Punishment At An Opioid Startup, wants Liza to stand in as a compromised figure with murky ethical motivations. But needing to follow a protagonist whose sympathies the film can leverage at any point blunts whatever judgment it wants to cast on its characters—and the broader history it’s trying to depict.

Similarly, the push to frame Liza’s role in the rise and fall of Lonafin within the confines of a quippy satire—with the likes of Catherine O’Hara (playing Liza’s mother, Jackie) and Andy Garcia infusing their characters with funky quirks—means it’s never biting enough to capture the world it wants to depict. This is nowhere more obvious than in its flimsy docuseries framing device where Liza, Pete, and Jackie give us an expository-heavy backstory meant to help speed the story along. The device, especially when presented on Netflix alongside so many ripped-from-the-headlines docuseries, has the unfortunate effect of feeling like a narrative stopgap designed solely for cheap gags (like Jackie complaining about the size of Liza’s head when she was born) and little else.

At the center of all this is a luminous performance by Emily Blunt. The actress—who is equally at home in big spectacle musicals, thrilling blockbusters, grounded horror tales, character-driven dramas, and indie comedies—is able to walk the fine line that Pain Hustlers demands of her. The wry world-weariness of Liza at the start of the film slowly gives way to a winning demeanor that soon begins to crack once the enormity of what she’s wrought on patients dawns on her. Against the more broad caricatures of Evans, Garcia, and even O’Hara, Blunt’s Liza is a revelation; she’s the emotional and moral anchor of the story.

It’s a pity she has to shoulder so much of the film’s wild tonal shifts. While it’s wildly entertaining to watch a performer walk such a tightrope, at some point you lament that the opioid crisis has been reduced to a circus sideshow.

Pain Hustlers is in select theaters now and arrives on Netflix on October 27