Pain Hustlers: Finding the Funny in Fentanyl isn't What the Doctor Ordered

By Chris Knight

Rating: C-

Pain Hustlers might be the latest manifestation of the Adam-McKay-tion of based-in-fact filmmaking.

McKay is the former SNL head writer who also wrote and directed a triumvirate of films about real-life topics, each one so peppy and funny that you almost forgot they were about the 2008 financial crisis (The Big Short), one of the architects of the Iraq War (Vice) and climate change or maybe an asteroid impact (Don’t Look Up).

NPR’s Linda Holmes subsequently noticed a similar bounciness in HBO’s Winning Time (which McKay executive produced) and Showtime’s Super Pumped (which he didn’t).

Emily Blunt is an unscrupulous opioid marketer in Pain Hustlers.

And here it comes again. Pain Hustlers was scripted by short-story writer Wells Tower, based on a New York Times article and subsequent book. It was directed by David Yates, whose filmography includes seven Harry Potter movies and, for some reason, 2016’s The Legend of Tarzan.

It’s about that laugh-a-minute topic fentanyl, the pain management medicine that, thanks to its toxicity, addictiveness, and ease of manufacture, has since 2018 overtaken heroin as the most common cause of drug-overdose deaths in America — more than 70,000 a year. Hoo-boy!

McKay didn’t have any part in Pain Hustlers, but the movie has a lot of his tics and flourishes, including multiple filming styles (it opens in black and white), slow-motion and freeze frames, and bizarre musical choices. There’s a rap number about titrating dosages that I assumed was fictional until learning that it was actually an exhibit in the trial of John Kapoor, former chairman of Insys Therapeutics, now doing five-and-a-half years for bribery.

Andy Garcia plays Dr. Jack Neel, the film’s Kapoor stand-in. He developed Lonafen, a fentanyl-laced painkiller, to ease his wife through her final days of terminal cancer. Now he’s trying to get doctors to prescribe it, but it’s difficult to break into the prescription medication business with something new.

Enter Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), a high-school dropout working as an exotic dancer at a strip club to pay for her daughter Phoebe’s epilepsy medication. On the job, she meets Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), who likes what he sees (no, not in a skeevy way) and offers her a job as a sales associate at Neel’s foundering company. 

She proves very good at what she does, although she wades into moral ambiguity from the start, using a combination of sex appeal and bribery, both covert and overt, to get doctors to prescribe her magic medicine. And the deeper into the mire she gets, the harder it is to get out. Money is its own opioid, don’t you know.

Very quickly she’s gone from squatting in the garage of her mother (Catherine O'Hara) to sending her daughter to a school so ritzy it has its own herd of alpacas. (If she “adopts" one, the principal tells her, Phoebe can move to the front of the admissions queue.)

The story rattles along at a mile-a-minute, thanks in large part to Blunt, who nails the bluff-your-way-to-the-top energy of her character, not to mention the underlying fear of losing it all again. Evans is less watchable, though that might be the fault of his character’s backstory, or lack thereof.

And Garcia provides just the right level of uncertainty, as his character slips into Howard Hughesian levels of germophobia and paranoia. Is his focus on easing people’s pain in memory of his departed wife, or is he just interested in making gobs of cash? Two things can be true.

The problem with Pain Hustlers comes back to that McKay-ness. I was already getting a little tired of the style when Don’t Look Up came out. And if you’re of a similar constitution, this film’s relentless pacing may wear a little thin.

But if, on the other hand, you’re a devotee of McKay’s mannerisms, you may find that Yates doesn’t manage to pull them off with quite the same aplomb. (The freeze-frames, to name but one stylistic choice, are ludicrously frequent, and include one that just pops up mid-scene, as if the film were suddenly buffering.)

And Pain Hustlers waits until very late in the game to really drive home some of the horrors behind the opioid epidemic. For too long we’re complicit with its characters. And maybe that’s what it’s going for; but if so, it left me with a mildly unpleasant aftertaste. Not quite what the doctor ordered.

Pain Hustlers. Directed by David Yates. Starring Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, and Andy Garcia. In theatres October 20 and on Netflix October 27.