PAIN HUSTLERS: Suffers From Pain Fatigue

Recently, our screens were graced with Mike Flanagan‘s gothic allegory of Edgar Allen Poe‘s The Fall of the House of Usher placed to the back drop of the Sackler family. Last year, Hulu’s Dopesick brilliantly attempted to give a comprehensive picture of the pandemic at its roots, from the perspective of the patients, the doctors and the family that started it all. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed won last year’s Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, photographer Nan Goldin exposing her own vulnerabilities and activism to the world. And while these have ranked high in both critical and audience reactions, they are but a few in a sea of depictions that surround the various effects of the opioid epidemic.

David Yates‘ Pain Hustlers is a decent film that is entertaining enough, yet it is met with the brutal truth of a pain fatigue within the industry. The pain epidemic is long from over, its ability to morph from one drug to the next making it seemingly impossible to defeat. And as new pain drugs rise, so does the entertainment industry’s coverage of it. And while there is fatigue in the coverage, it doesn’t help that this latest installment has little to say and even less heartfelt meaning behind it.

Forgive and Forget?

Initially, Pain Hustlers gives vibes of Hustlers, from its opening scenes in a strip club, to the cleverly brilliant undervalued woman who has the power to effect massive change – both for the good and the bad. While Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) is initially shown being saved by white knight Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), it is her innate ability of reading people that truly works to her advantage, introducing an opportunity that she wields to change her life forever. Offered a job by Peter, Liza starts down a path to curing pain – yet not without compromising the truth along the way. And while it might not always be Liza manipulating the truth, her knowledge makes her just as culpable.

The problem with Pain Hustlers is its constant attempt to paint Liza as a victim rather than a willing participant. It wants viewers to see an individual that set on a path to do good for a community of patients suffering, as well as strive to establish a stable home life for her daughter. Emily Blunt and Chris Evans are both standouts in the film, though the film’s premise delivers a fatigue in subject matter that at times leaves its existence in the the film feeling hollow and never completely emotionally invested. Audiences will find their connection to both wears thin, especially as we once again witness the devastating effects of greed.

And that is the core of the problem with Pain Hustlers. We are not watching the victims, we are watching those who in essence and varying amounts preyed on those with pain for a profit. Where other depictions of various stages of the epidemic have captured either a whole picture of the victims themselves or a villainous take on the culprits, Pain Hustlers feels as though there is not only  a depiction of greed, but also a vindication of the action. It has me reminiscing back to a recent screening of Killers of the Flower Moon. As the characters continually make the wrong choices, there is a frustration in their action, the film aware of the wrong doings and refusing to look away – refusing to make excuses. For Pain Hustlers, this feeling is all too often absent.

Conclusion

All we are left with is a hollow depiction of the efforts made by Liza, a pharmaceutical sales woman with little experience in the field, but with the gift to sell anything – to devastating effect. The film asks us to forgive her transgressions because of all she was able to achieve without truly balancing out the weight of these accomplishments. By film’s end, unfortunately, audiences will find no cast, direction or narration can make a story like this feel okay.

Have you seen Pain Hustlers? What did you think? Let us know in the comments below!

Pain Hustlers was released on Netflix on October 29, 2023!