Review of Pain Hustlers, directed by David Yates

I feel like I’ve typed this phrase out so much in the past few months, but when I wrapped up my master’s thesis in May 2024, pressed submit, and prepared to walk across the stage at graduation, I suddenly had a lot of free time.

Between the beginning of May and mid-June, I was basically just waiting to go to South Korea for two months on a Critical Language Scholarship from the United States government. That meant I was reading and watching a lot, and some of what I was consuming was just to keep myself from staring at the wall too long.

That said, I was watching a lot of content that I would probably never watch if I didn’t have this much free time. Pain Hustlers was one of them.

I watched this because the premise seemed interesting, not because. I was interested in the actors. And I think that was setting me back a little bit while watching this, as the script and storyline doesn’t translate as well on screen as it does with the written word I think.

Let’s get into the review!

A broke woman starts working with unethically selling drugs in order to make some money.

Our main character in this movie is Liza Drake, who lives with her daughter as a single mother. They’re currently housed in her sister’s garage, and the circumstances they’re living within are not ideal. But opportunity comes knocking when she goes to her job as a dancer: Pete Brenner, a customer, wants to bring her on to her company.

When Liza is kicked out of the garage, she goes to Pete and tells him she’ll take the job. She needs to sell drugs for him, and he rewrites her resume and gives it to the founder in order to make it seem like she has a solid education and background. The company is struggling, so the founder eagerly brings her on.

She needs to sell their drug Lonafen, and at first she really is not successful. Defeated, she returns to the first doctor, Lydell, and tries to pitch it to him. She hears a cancer patient describe how none of his treatments are working, and then successfully negotiates the usage of Lonafen.

Then she recruits Lydell to run a speaker program, which fails spectacularly. He almost drops the prescription because of it, but he stays with them with a little financial offer from Pete. The drug seems to work, and then they start expanding rapidly to other doctors.

One of the other employees tries to ousts Liza for her fake resume, but she gets promoted and the guy gets fired. They then expand into a bigger office, and the founder seems to be going off of the rails mentally. When their CEO is fired for recording, he sells all of his shares.

Growth then becomes stagnant, and the founder wants them to create marketing to use Lonafen as a general pain drug. He also wants Liza to fire her mother after he sleeps with her. She then gets dismissed after protesting about Lonafen’s new marketing strategy. She then gets further annoyed when Lydell is more happy to do this.

But her daughter has a seizure, and needs brain surgery. Liza needs the money for it, but is unable to cash in on her shares. Lydell is arrested, and Liza begs the founder for help. He extorts her instead, and when a friend’s husband dies, Liza realizes how terrible this all is further.

She goes to the U.S. Attorney to testify, and confirms the bribery going on in the company. She names all the names involved, and sets Pete up, leading to his arrest. She can’t dig up info on the founder, but then eventually gets an email thread from her mother implicating him.

Then we learn Lonafen is basically deadly for non-terminal patients. It increases the odds of addiction by a lot, leading to more overdose deaths. Liza, despite her efforts, has to go to prison for over a year for what she did. She then forms a skincare company when released.

Overall Thoughts

This is such a fascinating premise to me, as I mentioned before. However, the dialogue and how everything unfolds on the screen is kind of disappointing to watch.

I think part of the problem is that Emily Blunt kind of lacks any chemistry in this role. She doesn’t convince me that she’s this struggling mother digging deeper into the world of drugs. To me, her performance falls pretty flat and stagnant—her character seems pretty similar emotionally throughout the course of the movie.

The male characters we’ve also seen before. They’re the toxic Wall Street like guys who don’t care about other people’s lives; they’ll do anything in the name of a quick cash grab.

So all in all, this is a promising movie that falls flat for me. If someone loves it, great, good for them. Happy they enjoyed it! It just wasn’t my cup of tea at the end of the day.

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