Pain Hustlers
Emily Blunt and Chris Evans star in an entertaining comic drama that blows big raspberries at Big Pharma.
Emily Blunt and Chloe Coleman
It’s a great title. Think about it. Pain is something we can all identify with, and hustlers are usually good for a laugh. The characters here – a fictionalised dramatis personae drawn from Evan Hughes’ non-fiction book of the same name – are hustlers at the wrong end of the American dream. In the words of Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), “nothing is so inspiring as sheer desperation.” And she has learned from the best. As her boss, the eccentric billionaire Jack Neel (partially based on the entrepreneur John Kapoor), instructs her: “use your crisis as your fire.”
Liza Drake is definitely in crisis. Shacked up in her sister’s garage with a daughter suspended from school for arson, her face is asphalt-level. Her car barely starts, she and Phoebe (an effervescent Chloe Coleman) live off popcorn and Pot Noodles and Liza has been reduced to working in a “nudie bar”. She is desperate. She chants to herself, “I will not give up on myself; I will not give up on myself.” Then, when her sister (Aubrey Dollar) evicts her from the garage, Liza and Phoebe move to a third-rate motel room – where mother and daughter are forced to share a bed.
Then Liza meets Pete Brenner (Chris Evans) at work (the nudie bar), and, drunkenly, he hands her his business card. She is spectacularly unqualified (she was a high-school drop-out), but she applies for a job at his office, a pharmaceutical start-up peddling a new painkiller aimed at cancer patients. Touted as being “safer than aspirin” and with a five-minute efficacy, Zanna is the drug of the future. If only there were a way of bypassing the brand names that have the market in a headlock. Somehow, Liza blags her way into Pete’s employ – and she proves surprisingly good at her job…
Pain Hustlers begins with the legend, “What you’re about to see is inspired by real events,” before cutting to the caption ‘Florida, 2011’ and an image of the Seven Mile Bridge (great opening shot). However, what follows is very loosely inspired by real events, although the Opioid Crisis really did happen and John Kapoor was guilty of very unethical business practices (his company was actually called Insys Therapeutics). But the film is less about corruption as it is about the giddy ascent up the business ladder, as so recently documented in a slew of films from Ben Affleck’s Air to Matt Johnson's BlackBerry. There’s a whiff of Adam McKay in the directorial approach of David Yates, with black-and-white interviews to camera, slow mo’ and freeze frames – but McKay is considerably more relentless with his comic satire (cf. The Big Short, Vice, etc). Even so, Wells Tower’s punchy dialogue and some catchy performances (Chloe Coleman, Andy Garcia and a surprisingly free-flowing Chris Evans) grip the attention from the dollar up. And executive producer Emily Blunt can’t help but make us invest in the emotional trajectory of Liza’s venture. It’s just a shame that considering the on-going crisis in medical prescriptions, both legal and illegal, that a better film hasn’t come along to hold Big Pharma to account. It’s a topic that deserves the attention of a Martin Scorsese or a David Fincher, and this isn’t it.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Catherine O'Hara, Chloe Coleman, Jay Duplass, Brian d'Arcy James, Amit Shah, Aubrey Dollar, Valerie LeBlanc, Andy García, Willie Raysor, Britt Rentschler.
Dir David Yates, Pro Lawrence Grey and David Yates, Ex Pro Emily Blunt, Screenplay Wells Tower, from the book by Evan Hughes, Ph George Richmond, Pro Des Molly Hughes, Ed Mark Day, Music James Newton Howard and Michael Dean Parsons, Costumes Colleen Atwood, Sound Glenn Freemantle, Dialect coach Liz Himelstein.
Grey Matter Productions/Wychwood Pictures-Netflix.
122 mins. USA/UK. 2023. UK and US Rel: 27 October 2023. Cert. 15.
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