A review of the new film “Pain Hustlers”
A Netflix film starring Emily Blunt (“A Quiet Place”), Chris Evens (“Captain America”) and Andy Garcia (“Book Club”) has to be worth seeing, right? Well …The story is interesting enough: based on real events, it explains the role of key personnel at one of the pharmaceutical companies behind the opioid epidemic that has ravaged the United States in the last two decades (what is called Zanna in the movie was actually Insys Therapeutics and the fentanyl drug was marketed as Subsys). So why is it so disappointing?
Perhaps because there is too little focus on the victims rather than the perpetrators. Perhaps because the massive fraud is represented in too comical a style. Perhaps because the director David Yates is clearly better suited to his four “Harry Potter” and three “Fantastic Beasts” fantasy films than such a serious issue as opioids.