The Adam McKay style has become popular lately with several filmmakers. Similar to Tarantino’s style in Pulp Fiction of the non-linear story or Paul Thomas Anderson’s style in I’m Magnolia where a bunch of characters’ story arcs interconnect but they don’t necessarily know each other per se. McKay started his style with The Big Short and later perfected it on Winning Time the HBO series about the Showtime Lakers of the early 80s. Greg Gillespie earlier this year and now David Yates has copied his style for Pain Hustlers. 

Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) is a struggling single mother. She is having a hard time raising her sick daughter as an exotic dancer. When a well-dressed fast-talking man named Pete Brenner (Chris Evans) walks into her club and starts buying drinks and spotting off about his job and company he attracts her to his fancy lifestyle. She has everything to lose and quite a bit to gain but she quits her job anyway and goes to work for this man at his pharmaceutical startup company. 

As seen in the Hulu series Dope Sick and the most recent show on Netflix Painkiller, the opioid epidemic is a real thing. People by the thousands are losing their lives and even more are getting addicted to oxycontin or other various painkillers. This is a big business in this country and around the world. With the risks of getting arrested for illegal prescribing of these drugs or bribing doctors to talk about these drugs, there is still an upside to pushing these drugs for sales reps and pharmaceutical executives. Let’s just say it clearly, it’s big business.

Yates, famous for his Harry Potter films, seven of them all total, has assembled an all-star cast for this true story based on the book by Evan Hughes. As mentioned, Evans and Blunt are very good as the two leading actors in this story. The supporting cast includes Andy Garcia as a rich man who is the financial backing of the pharmaceutical company, Brian d’Arcy James as a morally corrupt doctor in Central Florida, Catherine O’Hara as Blunt character’s frisky mother, and Chloe Coleman as Blunt character’s daughter. The cast is stellar in their various roles supporting the two leads.

There is a specific thing Yates does that separates the narrative of the story. As the film progresses there is a distinct feeling there is a framing device. It starts very subtly with a few characters here and there in black and white seemingly narrating the film. These cutaways grew in importance as the movie moved closer to its conclusion. And it becomes evidently clear what these sequences are for. This was an interesting way to tell this story but I don’t know if it helped the film or not. The overall type of story has been done before in other films.

The two stars Evans and Blunt have been rumored to be getting a lot of awards buzz for their respective roles in this film but I’m here to say their fine but not great in these roles. These types of characters have been done before in other movies and I feel have been done better. The two have good chemistry opposite each other but don’t do anything new we haven’t seen before. I feel the script by Wells Tower based on Evan Hughes’ book didn’t serve them well. It was rather bland.

Even though I don’t make excuses for the opioid epidemic I feel like we’ve seen enough of these stories by now. If this was an original story or idea maybe it would have resonated with me more. It just felt like a mild rip-off of The Wolf of Wall Street to some extent. With none of the flare for the dramatic or humor of that film. Netflix has a bunch of other films coming out later in this awards season that I think will be bigger players when it’s all said and done. This one doesn’t seem to measure up.

3 stars

Dan Skip Allen