Emily Blunt Threatens To Make a Netflix Film Good in 'Pain Hustlers'

I’ll be honest, when I was assigned the review for Pain Hustlers, the new ‘Netflix movie’ that just started streaming on the platform, I didn’t exactly go in with high hopes. There’s a term in the gaming/computing world called ‘shovelware’, used for games or pieces of software that have no artistic merit or entertainment value. Though the term can be used to describe individual titles, it’s more useful when applied to broader industry trends, as it conjures up quite evocative imagery of companies cynically shoveling out vast quantities of cheap and low-quality product in the hopes of a quick payday.

Out of all the streaming services, I only have a subscription to Netflix (hanging on by a rapidly diminishing thread), so I can’t speak for the offerings of others, but ‘shovelware’ has seemed to me for a while now to be the best term possible to describe the company’s film release strategy. Having reviewed a fair number of these ‘films’ that Netflix pumps out, I put on Pain Hustlers while wearing the same expression a person might when a friend who only ever asks to borrow money with no intention of paying it back suddenly wakes them up with a midnight phone call. On a Tuesday.

But you know what?

Pain Hustlers isn’t that bad.

It’s not terrible.

It’s not great, but it’s also emphatically not Spiderhead.

So maybe that friend wasn’t ringing to ask for money again. Maybe this time they rang you up at midnight on a Tuesday because they were at a bar and they just wanted to tell a too-long, rambling, but occasionally amusing and just-coherent-enough story about something that had recently happened to them.

And, you know, that story just happened to feature Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Catherine O’Hara, and Andy Garcia for some reason.

Pain Hustlers is the feature screenwriting debut of Wells Tower and Evan Hughes, and is based on a book written by Hughes that was in turn based on a 2018 article of his written for New York Times Magazine about the corrupt practices of pharma company Insyys Therapeutics, which flooded the market with a form of fentanyl and contributed significantly to America’s lethal opioid epidemic. The film, directed by David Yates (the man behind a few of the later Harry Potter films), tells the story of Insys (here called Zanna) through the lens of high school dropout Liza Drake (Blunt), who, through economic desperation and a chance meeting with shark salesman Pete Brenner (Evans, best when playing these types of slimy bottom feeders), takes a job at a failing Zanna, and eventually manages to turn their—and her—fortunes around.

That all sounds like the recipe for an Adam McKay-style accusatory romp through the worst excesses of American capitalism, but Pain Hustlers never commits to the fire and fun that McKay brought to the best of his projects (The Big Short, which I still re-watch at least once a year). Though, to be fair, it also isn’t as misjudged a misfire as Don’t Look Up either. The film wants to highlight and detail just one of the innumerable corrupt matrices of modern America, showing how specifically monstrous the pharmaceutical industry can be on the population as a whole, while also presenting a cautionary tale of how easy it can be to be swept up in the monstrosities when the money is right. These are vital, era-defining themes, and the film has its heart in the right place—it just so happens that the technical execution leaves a lot to be desired.

Emily Blunt is the highlight here, as is often the case, and she elevates the material. She makes her character’s arc—so vital to the story—believable and relatable, bringing us with her all the way, even as the script and direction flounder, especially after the halfway point of its excessive two-hour runtime. One can only imagine what she (and her co-stars, especially O’Hara) could have done with a richer script and more assured direction. I didn’t think much of Wolf Of Wall Street (as much as I love Scorsese), but that movie dived fully into the excess, horror, and comedy in a way would have benefited Pain Hustlers. There is some snappy editing here and a handful of lively directing choices that threaten to push the film into more inspired territory, but it’s not enough to overwhelm the workmanlike, by-the-numbers construction of the rest of the project.

Which, by my reckoning, must surely put it fairly high up in the ranking of Netflix original movies then, yeah?