Pain Hustlers review: Netflix’s Emily Blunt opioid drama mixes its meds

How do you make a film concerning the opioid disaster enjoyable? Are you able to? Do you have to? The reply to those questions — as proposed by director David Yates (rising from Harry Potter jail, the place he’s been because the mid-2000s), screenwriter Wells Tower, star Emily Blunt, and Netflix — is Ache Hustlers, a fast-moving pharma drama that makes an attempt to mix an earnest, relatable problem film with the seductive extra of a Scorsese-lite true-crime curler coaster. It really works, up to some extent. Carried by a sometimes robust Blunt efficiency, Ache Hustlers is each watchable and eye-opening, regardless that its dramatic impulses do form of cancel one another out.

Tower primarily based his screenplay on Evan Hughes’ 2018 New York Occasions article and subsequent ebook about how, within the 2010s, a small pharmaceutical firm performed its means into the massive leagues — after which into racketeering expenses and chapter — on the again of highly effective, fentanyl-based opioid painkiller Subsys, which it successfully bribed medical doctors into prescribing. However Ache Hustlers is closely fictionalized. Tower modifications all of the names and strikes the motion from Arizona to Florida, enabling Yates to summon scenes of trailer-park desolation and fluorescent sleaze. He additionally invents the character of Liza Drake (Blunt), a hard-up single mother. For Liza, a gross sales gig hawking a Subsys-like drug is a means out of her determined financial scenario, and straight into an ethical quagmire.

Liza is brassy, passionate, street-smart, and empathetic, and he or she appears fairly clearly impressed by real-life crusader Erin Brockovich, as performed by Julia Roberts in Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 authorized drama a couple of working-class lady battling a company that’s poisoning individuals on the backside of the meals chain. However Liza additionally serves as a Jordan Belfort kind — Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Road, maybe the definitive film about gross sales tradition. Like Belfort, she’s designed to offer us a vicariously thrilling insider glimpse at how this murky world works.

Picture: Brian Douglas/Netflix

Working a shift at a strip membership, Liza bumps into Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a gross sales rep for Zanna, a pharma startup that’s failing to claw its means into the market with its fast-acting fentanyl formulation that customers spray beneath their tongues (referred to as Lonafen within the movie). He spots her intuitive expertise for giving individuals simply what they need, and he affords her a job.

When she accepts, partly out of fear about paying the medical payments for her daughter, who has epilepsy, Pete juices up her CV with pretend medical {qualifications} and presents it to Zanna’s eccentric founder, Jack Neel (Andy García). However first, he scrawls the letters “PHD” within the nook. Liza protests that she didn’t even end highschool, nevertheless it seems that is code for precisely how Zanna likes its salespeople: “poor, hungry, and dumb.”

Pete is correct on two counts, however Liza is something however dumb. Her ingenuity and attraction interlock completely with Pete’s ruthlessness. She swiftly climbs the ladder, saving the corporate by persuading Pete to let her create a low-rent model of the “speaker applications” different pharma firms use to recruit medical doctors to prescribe their merchandise. At these boozy, sponsored away-days, key medical doctors are paid to ship a speech to their friends — and to fellow purchasers. They’re a disguised type of kickback that operates in a authorized grey space; Pete describes the applications as “doing 67 in a 65 zone,” and says the perpetrating firms will solely earn a slapped-wrist positive in the event that they’re came upon.

Picture: Brian Douglas/Netflix

Wholesale bribery isn’t the top of it, although. Throughout the timeframe when Ache Hustlers is about, fentanyl-based medication are solely authorized as ache aid for late-stage most cancers sufferers, because the medication’ dangerously addictive qualities aren’t a major concern in these circumstances. However Neel desires to maintain his firm rising. Meaning new markets, which implies speaking medical doctors into pushing these potent opiates at sufferers who don’t want them. Overdoses begin to rack up, and Liza, now a rich advertising and marketing exec, faces a disaster of conscience.

Ache Hustlers requires a collection of fairly ungainly gear-shifts from Blunt, and it’s a testomony to her magnetism and sensible command of tone that she manages them so easily. It’s as a lot of a pleasure to observe her commerce barbs along with her mother (Catherine O’Hara) in a seedy motel room as it’s to watch her slick wheeling and dealing in a collection of eye-popping energy fits, or to go from there to tearful ethical awakening.

Evans flounders in her wake, miscast. That’s not as a result of this shameless, amoral position asks him to subvert his heroic Captain America persona. His half in Knives Out did the identical factor, and that was a delightfully flippant heel flip. However Ache Hustlers is just too loud for this secretly delicate actor. His greatest scenes with Blunt are a few deliciously underplayed events when Pete fumblingly tries to pivot their partnership in a romantic route, and Liza offhandedly rejects his pitch, undoing this inveterate salesman fully.

Picture: Brian Douglas/Netflix

Oddly for a film about salespeople, the place the filmmakers have clearly labored so exhausting on finessing their very own pitch, Ache Hustlers finally ends up underselling the human price of the opioid disaster. A couple of peripheral characters overdosing can’t start to explain the best way this corporately engineered epidemic of drug habit laid waste to whole communities, even (and particularly) after the crackdown on prescription opioids drove then hopelessly dependent populations towards heroin use. (In case you can abdomen it, try “Heroin City,” the primary episode of Louis Theroux’s documentary collection Darkish States, which explores the impression of the disaster on one West Virginia metropolis. It’s an hour of tv you’ll always remember.)

However the film does achieve unpacking the uncooked grift and exploitation of the pharma gross sales enterprise, and the broader dysfunction of the American well being care and authorized techniques that permits it to go unchecked. (Insys, the corporate that impressed the movie, maybe pushed issues too far and paid the worth, however the apply of “speaker applications” is outwardly nonetheless widespread.) Tower’s script has a lot empathy for its characters — together with the hustling gross sales reps and even a corrupt ache physician performed by Brian d’Arcy James — that it naturally turns the highlight on the morally bankrupt capitalist ecosystem that exploits all of them.

Yates, clearly having fun with leaving the Wizarding World behind after at least seven consecutive Harry Potter and Improbable Beasts movies, retains the film pacy and purposeful. The director appears to be exercising muscle groups he hasn’t used since directing the traditional 2003 British miniseries State of Play, a equally sinuous thriller with a conscience.

None of this is able to work as effectively if Ache Hustlers didn’t convey its perspective contained in the seedy pharma gross sales machine that powered a human disaster. However in Liza’s final-act awakening, the filmmakers attempt to have their cake and eat it too, and within the course of, they scrub away many of the story’s complexity and resonance. They commit neither to a Scorsesean journey into the guts of darkness, nor to Erin Brockovich’s clear-sighted campaign. Mixing these conflicting concepts turns this copycat right into a film with half the impression and a fraction of the ethical weight of both of these films. However nonetheless, Ache Hustlers is a enjoyable watch that additionally elucidates one of many darkest spasms of contemporary American capitalism, and that’s one thing. It makes the sale.

Ache Hustlers is streaming on Netflix now.