DRUG PUSHERS (PAIN HUSTLERS)

© Netflix

Netflix are at it again.

Having given us in August 'Painkiller' - a six episode miniseries about Purdue Pharma's aggressive marketing of Oxycontin, we have a movie dealing with another opioid.

David Yates' 'Pain Hustlers' is based on a true story but it takes a tongue in cheek approach to its account of the marketing of fentanyl.

Names have been changed from the actual story of billionaire John Kapoor and his company Insys who were found guilty in 2020 of bribing doctors and running a racketeering operation to drive up sales of their opioid spray, Subsys.

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The 76 year old physician was given a 66 month jail sentence and even went to the US Supreme Court to have it overturned - only for that bid to be rejected.

Based on an Evan Hughes' New York Times magazine article and his subsequent 2022 book also called 'Pain Hustlers,' Yates' film takes a 'Wolf of Wall Street' and 'The Big Short' style approach to the story, mixing it with elements of 'Erin Brokovich'.

Chris Evans' unscrupulous pharma executive Pete Brenner and other characters serve as narrators, breaking up the plot execution with documentary style interview in black and white that allow them to give their spin on what happened.

There are Scorsese-style freeze frames, voiceovers, loads of big captions and a general tone of Adam McKay style cynicism.

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Emily Blunt plays Liza Drake, a single mum working in a central Florida strip joint whose regarded as a bit of a mess by her family.

Clearly very bright but struggling to make ends meet, she spots Evans' Brenner among the punters at the strip joint where she dances and climbs doff the stage to join him for a drink.

He's dazzled by her intelligence and particularly by her ability to quickly read him and decipher his profession.

Pete offers her a job at the firm he works, Zanna which is owned by Andy Garcia's Dr Neel and which is struggling to get a foothold in the opioid market for its fentanyl spray Lonafin.

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After falling out with her sister Aubrey Dollar's Andy, Liza and her daughter Chloe Coleman's Phoebe go to live in a motel.

Phoebe is prone to epileptic fits due to a brain tumour that may require costly surgery. 

Liza, therefore, decides to take up Pete on his offer.

However the company is in a bit of a mess.

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Zanna has neither the budget nor the personnel to persuade doctors to start prescribing its spray which offers pain relief within five minutes to cancer sufferers.

This should be more attractive than its rival's product whose lollipop fentanyl dispenser causes mouth ulcers.

Turning up at the office during an unsuccessful pitch for investment by Pete, Dr Neel, Amit Shah's underwhelming CEO Eric Paley and Jay Duplass' petty Head of Marketing Larkin, Liza is ushered into Brenner's office.

Admiring her chutzpah, he falsifies her resume, claiming she has impressive academic qualifications  and gives her a week to land a doctor who will prescribe Lonafin.

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Given the inducements that are offered to medical practitioners by their rival's glamorous sales reps, it's a bit of a battle trying to reel in even one doctor.

However Liza manages to get Brian d'Arcy James' Dr Lydell to take the bait after hearing one of his patients complaining about mouth ulcers.

Before long, Liza and Pete are hoovering up medical practitioners by offering them financial inducements and other perks.

An army of mostly female sales reps - some of them beauty pageant contestants and ex strippers - are deployed and help make Lonafin the top cancer painkilling product, by any means necessary.

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As the profits flow in, Liza and Phoebe wind up in a gorgeous house, with a gorgeous car and a gorgeous school.

But as the riches grow, Dr Neel becomes more tetchy and fixated by the need to expand his drug's market beyond cancer pain relief.

He barks at Pete, Liza and other executives to lean on doctors to prescribe it to patients as a general pain relief medication, with little thought to the consequences of promoting a drug that may be addictive.

Inevitably, his decision comes back to bite.

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Conscious of the serious treatment of America's opioid crisis in acclaimed shows like Hulu and Disney+'s awards laden miniseries 'Dopesick,' Yates and his screenwriter Wells Tower decide to go in a different direction and take a more mischievous approach to the story.

Liza, Pete, Larkin and Dr Neel are presented as rogues as if they are in a caper movie. 

And while the film acknowledges the devastating impact that opioid addiction has had on families and communities across the US, it refuses to dwell on the suffering.

'Pain Hustlers' is instead more interested in the immorality and greed of the pharma executives and the doctors who colluded with them.

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However the failure to properly address the catastrophic effects on US society of the Faustian pacts that were made between big pharma and doctors is a major misjudgment. 

The irreverent tone adopted by Yates and Tower blunts (no pun intended) the reality of the characters' greed.

'Pain Killers' is simply too much of a jolly wheeze. 

In spite of this huge flaw, it remains a zippy and at times entertaining watch - impressively paced by Yates and his film editor Mark Day.

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There's some cleverly deployed needle drops from the likes of Declan McKenna, Rose Royce, Mavis Staples, HiFi Sean and David McAlmont, Little Richard and The Temptations.

The movie's ace card, though, is Emily Blunt who oozes so much charisma in the lead part, it obliterates everyone else - bar, possibly Catherine O'Hara as her supportive mum Jackie who rather improbably ends up working for the company.

Evans is okay in the other major role.

It's encouraging to see him continue to stretch himself as an actor with an unlikeable part.

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However he's no Brad Pitt or Ryan Gosling and doesn't completely convince as a morally dubious narrator.

Garcia is an intriguing, enigmatic presence as Dr Neel.

Although you do wish the film would explore his eccentricity a bit more.

d'Arcy James, Coleman, Duplass, Shah and Dollar turn in decent, if unspectacular performances.

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By focusing mostly on the moral bankruptcy of pharma executives, Yates and Tower set a very difficult challenge for themselves.

Movies that zone in on the excesses, corruption and gaudiness of business executives who always put profit before people always run the risk of muddying their message by revelling too much in the hedonism.

That's where 'The Wolf of Wall Street' fell down and that's what happens here.

Films that deftly expose moral bankruptcy in big business like 'The Big Short' are all too rare.

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'Pain Hustlers' aims for that goal but it comes up far too short.

Its tone is too skittish and it cannot escape the fact that others - namely the creators of 'Dopesick' - have told this story much better.

Sometimes subjects like the opioid crisis need to be treated with the seriousness they demand.

('Pain Hustlers' received its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2023 and was made available for streaming on Netflix on October 27, 2023)