Metacritic reviews

Pain Hustlers is strongest when it focuses on Liza and maps her complicated web of desire and integrity.

Pain Hustlers entertains thanks to its strong leads but it’s hard not to find it a derivative look at a tough topic that relies on tropes from far superior movies.

In the end, watching Pain Hustlers is about as numbing an experience as being prescribed the drug Liza spent her career selling.

In a streaming landscape already saturated with takedowns of Big Pharma and its pill-popping perfidy, it’s a generic version of far more powerful originals.

Long on voiceovers, short on specificity, and so high on the generic-brand Scorsese of it all that it glosses right over the gray areas that make its characters so tragic, Yates’ film is more focused on being easy to swallow than it is on meaningfully addressing the source of the pain.

Yates makes Pain Hustlers part-rowdy dramedy, part-half-assed takedown, and entirely an underwhelming film that attempts to make apparent and bland points.

Blunt remains committed to the end but even she can’t add a shine to the drab last act, the pleasure of seeing her on screen replaced with the pain of another undeserving project.

While Pain Hustlers is a perfectly fine title, the film probably should have been called Liza Drake, the name of the sales rep played by Emily Blunt, who single-handedly almost saves this tone-deaf drama from itself.

Despite a typically strong performance from Blunt - and a fun, if one-note, Evans - neither the rise nor the inevitable fall ever feel all that compelling. It lacks the sheer audaciousness of the similarly structured The Wolf of Wall Street, and doesn’t come close to the energy of The Big Short, which whipped up furious indignation while being massively entertaining at the same time.

Pain Hustlers takes an off-putting mock-documentary approach to this tragedy, focusing on a handful of sleazebag salespeople who bent the rules to incentivize doctors to prescribe Lonafin (the film’s fictional Subsys substitute) first for treating cancer pain, and later for conditions as mild as migraines.