polygon.com
27.10.2023 / 18:24
Netflix’s Pain Hustlers crams Wolf of Wall Street and Erin Brockovich into one mismatched movie
How do you make a movie about the opioid crisis fun? Can you? Should you? The answer to these questions — as proposed by director David Yates (emerging from Harry Potter jail, where he’s been since the mid-2000s), screenwriter Wells Tower, star Emily Blunt, and Netflix — is Pain Hustlers, a fast-moving pharma drama that attempts to blend an earnest, relatable issue movie with the seductive excess of a Scorsese-lite true-crime roller coaster. It works, up to a point. Carried by a typically strong Blunt performance, Pain Hustlers is both watchable and eye-opening, even though its dramatic impulses do kind of cancel each other out.