Emily Blunt Tries on Erin Brockovich’s Push-up Bra in Pain Hustlers: Review

The post Emily Blunt Tries on Erin Brockovich’s Push-up Bra in Pain Hustlers: Review appeared first on Consequence.

The Pitch: America’s issues with prescription drugs aren’t limited to oxycontin and the Sacklers. In 2011, desperate single mom Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) parlays a drunken strip club encounter with Pete Brenner (Chris Evans) into a sales job for a failing pharmaceutical start-up. Turns out, she’s pretty good at the hustle involved in manipulating doctors into writing prescriptions for her company’s pain medication, Lonafen, and before long she, her daughter (Chloe Coleman), and mother (Catherine O’Hara) are enjoying the financial benefits as the company’s fortunes boom.

Unfortunately, the “fen” in Lonafen stands for fentanyl, and while patients are initially excited about the “miracle drug,” its addictive qualities have a crushing impact on patients’ lives. That, plus the illegal methods by which Liza, Pete, and the other Zanna Pharmaceuticals employees use to boost their sales, means that Zanna is a house that will come crashing down soon.

Pseudo-Fiction: Fentanyl is one of those drugs that feels like it only really broke into the public consciousness when it became tied to a staggering amount of overdoses that still continue today. So while Pain Hustlers, directed by David Yates, is a fictionalized version of a 2018 New York Times article, it’s rooted in a haunting reality.

Pain Hustlers, if only because of its feature-length runtime, doesn’t spend too much time exploring the already-well-explored territory of what desperate addiction looks like, but the catch is that the people whose lives are most affected by Lonafen use are cautionary tales as opposed to real characters. Yates’s direction (a wild deviation from his past films in the Harry Potter-verse) and Wells Tower’s script use a pseudo-documentary approach: Characters speaking directly to the camera for talking head reflections on the rise and fall of the fictitious Zanna Pharmaceuticals (“inspired by real events,” is how the opening text puts it).

And it doesn’t hesitate to glory in its more absurd moments, like Broadway legend Brian D’Arcy James doing a karaoke cover of Semisonic’s “Closing Time.” However, the fact that it’s unmoored from actual events is just one element holding back a movie that avoids any real Big Short-esque narrative flash, but still manages to feel a little glib about its subject matter.

Pain Hustlers (Netflix)

Borrowing Julia Roberts’ Push-Up Bra: Playing Liza Drake is Emily Blunt’s Erin Brockovich moment, and to her credit she delivers the kind of charm necessary to sell the pharma pusher as a decent person doing her best to ignore the truth of her work. There’s something quite compelling about her arc, which begins with her at seemingly rock bottom, desperate for any sort of lifeline out of poverty; it’s only once she’s created a better life for herself and her daughter that the ethical repercussions of her actions become clearer. It’s easy to do the right thing if you know where your next meal is coming from, and a lot harder if you remember all too well what it was like to starve. Exploring this dynamic is easily where the film shines best.

Chris Evans, meanwhile, seems to really be enjoying what can only be called his “dick era,” adding his scheming pharma rep (who can’t stop hitting on Liza) to other notable roles like the be-sweatered dick of Knives Out and the be-mustached dick of The Gray Man. And hey, if you spent the better part of a decade playing Captain America, you’d probably be enjoying this just as much as him. But Evans isn’t just indulging in the opportunity to play a little slimy here — Pete feels all too believable as the kind of guy who would prop up a criminal enterprise like this, loving the game until the game gets called off because the cops have arrived.

The Verdict: It’s heartbreaking to suggest that the problem with a film might be international treasure Catherine O’Hara, but her role as Liza’s mother may be the lynchpin of Pain Hustlers‘s issues. While the Best in Show actress brings a ton of life to the screen, her performance is maybe too much of a caricature to fit with the otherwise only semi-comic approach to this material, especially as the dark side of Lonafen usage emerges and it becomes apparent how criminal an enterprise this company is.

Pain Husters manages to avoid feeling like an Adam McKay remake of Dopesick, but its shifting tone never quite hits the right notes: “Inspired by true events” offers up a lot of narrative freedom, but it reduces the potency of any potential message, especially when its heroine is operating in a much more gray area than Julia Roberts’ corporation-busting activist ever did. Though it may not be an awards contender, there are still sparks throughout to appreciate, especially in Blunt and Evans’ performances. Thanks to them, there’s a lot of humanity to be found in the film — the best and the worst of it.

Where to Watch: Pain Hustlers is streaming now on Netflix.

Trailer:

Emily Blunt Tries on Erin Brockovich’s Push-up Bra in Pain Hustlers: Review
Liz Shannon Miller

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