PAIN HUSTLERS - Mark Reviews Movies

Pain Hustlers, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 26, 2023

As is often the case with dramatizations of real-life stories, there's probably a fine documentary to be made (if there hasn't been already, considering how many randomly show up on TV and streaming services every week) about the subject of Pain Hustlers. Director David Yates' movie is based on the true story of a pharmaceutical company that expanded the use of its opioid-based product beyond federally approved usage. That process leads to untold numbers of cases of addiction, death, and, for those who knew the victims, misery.

It's an old story at this point, unfortunately. Beyond the facts that this movie offers nothing new to say about the subject and says those familiar things in a routine way, the human toll of the crisis at its core seems like an afterthought to the filmmakers.

Instead, screenwriter Wells Tower, adapting the non-fiction book by Evan Hughes but changing all of the actual names of the people and businesses involved, takes an insiders' look at how a small pharmaceutical company, its representatives, and a good number of doctors succumb to the temptations of greed. It wants us to have some degree of sympathy for these people, who start their journey with good intentions in helping terminal and/or agonized cancer patients deal with the pain of their disease and the treatments for it.

In the process, the story suggests it's the money, not the people or the corrupt and/or incompetent systems that make obscenely earned profits possible, that's mostly to blame here. If that were the case, this story and others like it would never happen, but to some, money is not a means to an end. The obtainment of it is a constant goal with no end and to be won by any means necessary.

This movie steps in a naïve direction almost from the start, with the introduction of Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), a single mother who simply wants to make as comfortable and normal a life as possible for her pre-teen daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman). Liza works at a strip club and lives in her sister's garage when we first meet her, shortly before she meets Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a sales representative for a small and failing pharmaceutical company based in Florida.

She's good at reading people, Pete admits during a post hoc interview in the style of a documentary on what will transpire over the course of this story, and using that to her advantage. Spotting that, he offers her a sales job at the company, run by Dr. Neel (Andy Garcia), whose wife's painful death to cancer led him to developing a faster way for similar patients to relieve their pain.

Ignoring the familiar course of this story—which has Liza and Pete transforming the business into an overnight success and starting the process of its corruption—for a moment, let's deal with those fake interview scenes. They're obviously intended to give the story the air of authenticity and legitimacy, but apart from blunt exposition and the gimmick's sudden return at the end to summarize the consequences and lessons of the story, what purpose do they actually serve?

There are a few moments when Yates and Tower implement them to bring us outside of the insulated world of pharmaceutical sales and corporate malfeasance, mainly through interviews with cancer patient Matt (Willie Raysor), who finds a new lease on life with the company's under-the-tongue aerosol pain-killer but becomes dependent on the drug. Those couple of scenes, partnered with a mostly silent depiction of another character becoming addicted to the medication and some shots of family members holding photos of loved ones who died because of the drug, might suggest the filmmakers do care about the human cost of these business practices.

Those moments, though, are the full extent of the movie's depiction of the addiction and death that this company brings to so many. The significant bulk of the story is devoted to vaguely unpacking the shady practices of paying doctors for prescriptions, using those same doctors as recruiters of more medical professional at pseudo-legal conferences, and strongly suggesting to an army of paid doctors that the drug could be prescribed for off-label use—such as for minor injuries or even migraines.

There's nothing daring or revolutionary in revealing such practices at this point, and Yates' straightforward approach to this section only shows how little detail Tower's script provides in dissecting the procedures and the legal lines of them. It's a better approach, at least, than the second half of Pain Hustlers, which almost seems to turn its pharmaceutical representatives and executives into victims of just wanting more and finding it too easy to get it. The real victims of this story, though, remain voiceless by comparison.

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