Pain Hustlers: A Film With a Good Premise, But Lacking in Substance

Pain Hustlers, directed by David Yates, written by Wells Tower and Evan Hughes, is a film based “loosely” upon Hughes’s New York Times article with the same name and his book that is currently being published,, about the abuse of power in the American pharmaceutical and health industries.

Running on the heels of Netflix’s Painkiller, a beautifully made, limited series about how Perdue Pharmaceuticals and their crooked misuse of power and greed, founded the American opioid crisis, Hustlers takes a more fictional, comedic slant.

Though the lightheartedness makes it a somewhat easier pill to swallow, the lack of characterization and focus on the people who suffered through it left a foul taste.

Desperation kills

Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) is a single mother to her daughter Phoebe, (Chloe Coleman). Liza works as a stripper at night and lives in her sister’s garage. We are shown that Liza seems to struggle a lot in life, according to her family, and hasn’t gotten her lucky break.

One night at the strip club, Liza meets Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a smooth talking alpha type, who works at a pharmaceutical company. He ends up liking Liza and gives her his number should she ever want a job at the company. When Liza’s situation takes a turn for the worse, she calls Pete and ends up taking him up on it.

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After helping Liza lie about her credentials to the point of turning two years of high school to a PhD, Brenner recommends her to his boss and the company’s founder, the unhinged Dr. Neel (Andy Garcia). The company is at the point of bankruptcy, as the one drug they were banking on, simply isn’t on any provider’s radar.

Neel and Brenner groom Liza into the world of unscrupulous big pharma, and she becomes their top seller, lured in by the promise of big money and her need to feel like she is doing something great.

When the drug inevitably starts to get prescribed outside of the parameters set by the FDA, and patient addiction ensues, Liza must face what she has done and attempt to remove herself from the hundreds of million dollars greed fest she got herself into.

In all honesty…

Pain Hustlers is rather perplexing. Though the film and production design quality is good, there were many places that felt very awkward, that more character development, conscientious casting and script care may have cured.

Blunt as Liza was the most miscast. She is much too refined, beautiful and clearly emanating wealth from all of her pores to be playing this character. For this reason, Liza’s lack was not heavily translated through her. It was completely impossible to suspend disbelief that she would be a stripper.

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There also wasn’t enough desperation written into Liza’s life to do the things that she ends up doing. Her family is wealthy and she comes across as much too smart to fall for the ploys of the toxic system she sells her soul to. As a result, any of her efforts to change came off as uninspired because great need wasn’t there.

As a big fan of Andy Garcia’s most of my life, he simply wasn’t given enough to make an impact. Neel is not a fully fleshed out character and Garcia’s abilities were wasted here.

He does what he can with a character that is on the verge of a breakdown, but we never know enough about Neel or his background to invest much into the character. I didn’t love him or hate him, he was just kind of there, playing a greedy boss who’s mental health is declining, for reasons that also allude us.

I was most troubled about some of the reasons Yates and producer Lawrence Grey had, not only for making this film, but their reasons for using humor in a film such as this.

“Humor has always been a part of my storytelling as a filmmaker - it allows an audience in, and even with a subject as dark and as important as this, there is room for it “, and “the story about the pharmaceutical industry, that’s just an outrageous, amazing, darkly comic, thrilling subculture which is impossible to invent.”

As Americans we have seen countless drugs that have been touted as safe to use, end up needlessly and permanently harming and even killing people. There is nothing comical or amazing about it. Big pharma is a massive reprehensible beast that is relentless in the pursuit of money at all costs. It is despicable and murderous, hardly thrilling.

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If people are going to make a film on a subject this horrifying, they should study up and have a lot more respect for what they are getting into, especially those from abroad who don’t have to live in it. Maybe make something condemning the diabolical American “health” system that helps promote big change.

They also stated that the victims would be “first and foremost” in the film, which did not happen. The victims featured were used more as story beats for Liza to turn her perspective around.

The film spent more time with the celebratory, money hungry dealers and their successes rather than with the effects it had on real families and people addicted to drugs by an underregulated, rotten system, where no wealthy execs are ever held accountable.

They even likened pharmaceutical companies as an “American Dream” of sorts, where poor, undereducated people could end up making big money. But at what cost? These people are generally recruited into the big pharma “cult”, and lied to about what they are selling to begin with.

One example I remember was the Fen-Phen craze in the 80’s that gave many people heart attacks in the pursuit of toxic thinness. I guarantee we are going to also start hearing about the new Ozempic craze, made famous by the rich, as it poisons more people in our grotesque drive for thinness at any cost and fat phobic stigma.

America is also the largest of the two countries in the world where it is legal to advertise drugs on mainstream media. The FDA, at this time, can’t limit the amount of money big pharma spends on advertising expensive drugs, nor ban advertisements of higher risk drugs.

It is a multi-billion dollar disease that robs hundreds of millions of people real healthcare and, has also been shown to increase health care costs. There were many, better and more responsible choices of angles to go with.

Overall, Pain Hustlers isn’t a terribly made film. It struggles in multiple ways to be effective and leaves us with the feeling that the makers weren’t on the right side of the slant they ran with. It was too frivolously handled given the topic and it wasn’t clear as to what message it intended to get across in the first place.

Your time would be better spent watching Netflix’s Painkiller instead. Ditch the glitzy big names and settle into an eye-opening limited series that definitely makes big pharma the cruel, greedy overlords that they truly are.