Pain Hustlers

Pain Hustlers Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Chris Evans, Emily Blunt, Catherine O’Hara, Jay Duplass, Andy Garcia, and ensemble.

Director: David Yates.

What’s Good: Emily tries to make sense of the material she is offered by trying to bring emotions to it.

What’s Bad: what can she do when the source material is paper thin and eventually is aiming to only have a DJ Snake song while people jump into the pool.

Loo Break: how about first making sure you want to invest time in it?

Watch or Not?: if you cannot resist watching Evans and Blunt, how can I even stop you? But if you can, I went through it, so you don’t have to.

Language: English (with subtitles).

Available On: Netflix.

Runtime: 122 Minutes

User Rating:

Liza (Emily), a bankrupt woman living with her daughter and mother, is suddenly offered a job by Pete (Chris), a manager for a pharmaceutical company suffering loss. She takes the sales to a new high, enabling a luxurious life for herself. But when the reality hits her, she fights back.

Pain Hustlers Movie Review: Script Analysis

Whenever in world cinema, any filmmaker attempts to tell stories of real people who enabled an illegal branch in the world, there is objectivity and nuances they are supposed to walk with. Narcos wouldn’t have been what it is if the creator could have started justifying the decisions his subject made when he was alive, or vibrantly painted his deeds. That could have gone horribly wrong. Pain Hustlers that, now streams on Netflix and houses a top-notch ensemble does precisely the opposite, and everything that is not supposed to, go wrong.

With Wells Tower on screenplay, adapted from Evan Hughes’ book, Pain Hustlers feels like a movie with no moral ground. Now, there is no wrong in making movies that are just about bad people with none having the bone for realization, but what is wrong is when the writing barters nuances for a DJ Snake song. For a film that is about the people who enabled the opioid crisis in America, the movie is too peppy and looks at them like they are funny people doing something very inconsequential. Lives are at risk; many people are getting addicted; the profit is at the cost of people who are unaware of what they are consuming. But the makers instead choose to show a funny boss who is worried about his exquisite flooring.

That could have even worked if the complexities and the nuances of this world could have found some space in this world. When Liza gets some sense that what she is doing is wrong, the movie just randomly decides to speed up and reach the end with vice overs doing half the job. We never get to sit with the woman who has gone through a rollercoaster ride in the past two years. We instead get to see two evil men being evil with no backstories at all.

Pain Hustlers Movie Review: Star Performance

Emily Blunt tries to make sense of what is on her plate but can only manage to an extent because the material is so paper thin that any form of acting cannot save it. Blunt, as an individual, does a great job of juggling between a bankrupt woman, a mother, a boss, and a daughter.

This could be the most evil Chris Evans might have ever played, but for a movie that is doing nothing to respect his stature even a bit. His character is so half-baked and poorly written that he has the lowest recall value amongst the cast. Rest everyone gets to play one tone parts with no motivation involved.