IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 27th October
Seen: 2nd November
The current opioid crisis that’s going on feels like it’s almost inevitably going to be the fodder for a ton of movies and TV shows just because it feels so insidious. It’s aA= massive health crisis that’s ravaged a desperate part of society and was turbocharged by a couple of money-hungry assholes who already have more money than god. That right there is basically the kind of situation that is destined to be turned into a form of consumable entertainment so that we can hope to understand just how this happened to hopefully start working on repairing the damage. A recent miniseries that tackled this was Dopesick which was a big hit but is also 8 episodes long, that might be too much for some people so a speedier version of this story is told in Pain Hustlers, a dark crime drama that shoots for the stars but just barely manages to hit orbit.
Pain Hustlers starts with single mother Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) who is desperately trying to provide for her child by any means necessary, even if that means working in a strip club. At that club is where Liza runs into Pete Brenner (Chris Evans) who offers her a chance at something bigger and better, specifically offering her a job at his pharmaceutical company Zanna, a failing company that has an allegedly wonderful product that’s better for pain than anything else on the market. Together Liza and Pete become something of a wonder team, getting the drug into the prescription pads of doctors all over the country and making an obscene amount of money, while also inadvertently creating an addiction crisis that takes countless lives.
Pain Hustlers plays somewhat like a discount version of Wolf of Wall Street, possibly because the story of a scam artist who ruins lives is pretty much the same no matter what the scam is. All the key beats are here, just replace a finance bro with a drug company and it’s effectively the same story that also asks you to willingly enjoy following the crimes and adventures of an asshole for a few hours.
Fortunately for Pain Hustlers, their two leads are compelling enough characters that watching them trying to figure out how to play the system to their advantage is pretty enjoyable, they both manage to play around with the moral ambiguity of the characters in a way that they aren’t completely detestable, despite what they end up causing (you know, the whole opioid crisis). It’s a tough job to play objectively bad people who you still want to spend time with and these two toe that line pretty well. Admittedly the Pete character is probably just more outright ‘bad person’ while Liza is a person caught in a bad situation but the movie still presents their actions as being bad.
Indeed the thing that Pain Hustlers absolutely excels in is the performances, the lead pair of Emily Blunt and Chris Evans have a good chemistry that sells their relationship pretty damn effectively, the scenes that are just the two of them mouthing off to each other are genuinely compelling and a decent time. A lot of the side parts are also pretty good, in particular Catherine O’Hara as Liza’s mom and Andy Garcia as the eccentric billionaire bankrolling the company, those two keep stealing any scene that they’re in and help make this a decent ensemble instead of just a two-person show. Everyone is giving interesting layered compelling performances that help make the material be as easily digestible as possible… they’re not being helped by the director though.
Pain Hustlers is being helmed by David Yates, his first time directing something that isn’t a Harry Potter film since his Tarzan film of 2016 and maybe it’s just that he’s so used to effects-heavy films that he forgot how to handle a basic drama but this is about as basic as you can get in terms of direction. To bring up the Wolf of Wall Street comparison again, that film felt like it was going a mile a minute and managed to be utterly compelling for 3 hours based on how fantastic it looked and how the director managed to play with the fourth wall, how they moved everything about, it was a boring subject that was handled like the greatest crime thriller in history and it made for a great movie… Pain Hustlers is treating everything like it’s just kind of happening, there’s no real energy that’s being provided by anyone other than the actors. There are a few times when they attempt to do something stylistic but, partially thanks to this being a Netflix film, it feels more like the movie just started buffering weirdly which is not anywhere near as impressive as this film might think it is.
That slow direction makes it so hard to really get into the power of this story, Pain Hustlers is a film about a conspiracy of people to make money out of the suffering of others so it should be one of the most compelling things you’ve ever seen but if one actor dares to drop the ball for a second the audience has nothing to cling to, the film itself isn’t making a case for why this is as interesting as it should be. It feels like they couldn’t decide if they were doing a straight just-the-facts drama or some stylised piece and so they hit somewhere in the middle which is just not going to work in the long run. Either go all the way with stylism or don’t, doing a half-assed attempt at it with a few shots somewhere near the end just looks like you only just realised the medium you’re in. Without that energy in the filmmaking, everything else just kind of falls flat.
Pain Hustlers certainly has a fair bit going for it, a great cast and a decent script that shows the trail of how this hellish situation occurred in pretty good detail. It’s got everything it needs to be a compelling crime drama except that the way everything is presented makes it kind of dull when this should be about as fascinating as you can get. It’s not that the film is bad, there are worse ways to spend a few hours than a slightly lackluster drama with a couple of decent leads telling an important story but it could’ve been so much better, it feels like the film took a couple of Ambien and it’s about to fall asleep right in front of us.
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