Netflix’s Pain Hustlers crams Wolf of Wall Street and Erin Brockovich into one mismatched movie
How do you make a movie about the opioid crisis fun? Can you? Should you? The answer to these questions — as proposed by director David Yates (emerging from Harry Potter jail, where he’s been since the mid-2000s), screenwriter Wells Tower, star Emily Blunt, and Netflix — is Pain Hustlers, a fast-moving pharma drama that attempts to blend an earnest, relatable issue movie with the seductive excess of a Scorsese-lite true-crime roller coaster. It works, up to a point. Carried by a typically strong Blunt performance, Pain Hustlers is both watchable and eye-opening, even though its dramatic impulses do kind of cancel each other out.
Tower based his screenplay on Evan Hughes’ 2018 New York Times article and subsequent book about how, in the 2010s, a small pharmaceutical company played its way into the big leagues — and then into racketeering charges and bankruptcy — on the back of powerful, fentanyl-based opioid painkiller Subsys, which it effectively bribed doctors into prescribing. But Pain Hustlers is heavily fictionalized. Tower changes all the names and moves the action from Arizona to Florida, enabling Yates to summon scenes of trailer-park desolation and fluorescent sleaze. He also invents the character of Liza Drake (Blunt), a hard-up single mom. For Liza, a sales gig hawking a Subsys-like drug is a way out of her desperate economic situation, and straight into a moral quagmire.
Liza is brassy, passionate, street-smart, and empathetic, and she seems quite clearly inspired by real-life crusader Erin Brockovich, as played by Julia Roberts in Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 legal drama about a working-class woman battling a corporation that’s poisoning people at the bottom of the food chain. But Liza also serves as a Jordan
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