“Pain Hustlers” follows Emily Blunt as Liza Drake, a single mom who, out of options and desperate for financial stability, becomes a pharma rep for a struggling pharmaceutical startup that makes an opioid to treat cancer patients — with a big sappy story from its founder about wanting to heal her late wife’s pain but being unable to in time. In order to save the company, and lured in with the promise of a hefty commission, Drake gets involved in a racketeering scheme that includes a “speaker program” where vulnerable doctors are paid to convince other doctors to prescribe the company’s drug, as the company becomes too big to fall — before, of course, falling.
Yates is mostly interested in the rising part of this rise and fall story, with the rather slow 2-hour-runtime spending much of its time on the lavish parties and footage of the characters celebrating their success. Except, while the film clearly wants to be “The Wolf of Wall Street,” it fails at being either fun, wild, or gripping.
Worse yet, there is rather little about the actual opioid crisis in “Pain Hustlers,” except for quick montages of people we’ve met throughout the film mentioning how they were affected — mostly in passing and near the end. It fails to fully grasp what’s made the opioid epidemic such a national emergency, and it fails to capture the scale of the human evil and greed at hand.