Pain Hustlers, the first David Yates movie following the three Fantastic Beasts films, seems to have it all. 21st-century big screen favorites Emily Blunt and Chris Evans lead the cast, with Catherine O’Hara showing up as well, and the premise dramatizing and critiquing the opioid crisis has promise and eternal relevance. Pain Hustlers has everything except for good reviews, but there’s plenty that this winning batch of filmmakers got so wrong.
Pain Hustlers Plot Summary
Blunt’s character, Liza Drake, loses her job as a dancer and joins a scheme selling prescription drugs that becomes essentially a license to print money. The criminal and moral troubles with this line of work soon catch up with her, of course, as investigators seek to expose the dangerous practice of Liza’s co-conspirators.
Blunt and Evans Are Not to Blame for the Failures
Aside from some possibly inadvisable accents, Blunt and Evans appear to be acting the way Yates has directed in Pain Hustlers. Not particularly bad or good in quality, the two of them do their part to convey the design of their characters, but the writing reveals that there is not much worthy of salvation. Experienced film viewers will see Pain Hustlers and the characters within as thin sketches pretty quickly, with odd decisions from the filmmakers stealing away attention before Blunt can reel the audience in. Evans appeals in his unsavory new roles that have made for great counterprogramming of his Captain America image, but his and Blunt’s abilities never overcome the shoddy craftsmanship here.
David Yates’ Missed Opportunities in Pain Hustlers
Yates’ career as the director of four Harry Potter movies, three Fantastic Beasts, and one The Legend of Tarzan (the one starring Alexander Skarsgård) has occasionally managed to capture emotional performances, but most consider his output uneven. In Pain Hustlers, his uncertainty at how to portray the magnanimous topic that Pain Hustlers addresses carries through nearly every sequence. Is Pain Hustlers a condemnation of how real people accidentally created the opioid epidemic or a showcase of those highs and lows built through a dramatic characterization of lying and greed? It seems that Yates did not know the answer when developing his directing style for Pain Hustlers since one could call his ability to say something meaningful with his film tepid at best and facile at its worst.
Emily Blunt and Chris Evans in ‘Pain Hustlers’
Does the Entertainment Value Overcome the Flaws in Pain Hustlers?
Any competently directed experience about pharmaceutical evils would be a better call to watch this weekend, while the greed and excess shown in the film have countless better instances as well. Simply put, Pain Hustlers is one of the worst films in whichever category you try to put it in, so we cannot recommend it over any other similar film. A more authentic, dramatized portrayal like Dopesick or an over-the-top but sincere one like The Fall of the House of Usher will always be the better choice.
Pain Hustlers is streaming now on Netflix.