‘Pain Hustlers’ Review: Emily Blunt and Chris Evans Say ‘Yes’ to Drugs in Taxing Satire of Opioid Slingers

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Early in his career, comedian Kumail Nanjiani did a bit about a new drug called “cheese,” which, if you break down the ingredients, turns out to be Tylenol PM mixed with heroin. “So really, it’s heroin,” he joked. “Heroin’s doing the heavy lifting.” That line was going through my mind as I watched “Pain Hustlers,” a garish and, yes, mostly painful Big Pharma satire from director David Yates, who (“The Legend of Tarzan” aside) spent the last 15 years making increasingly convoluted Harry Potter movies. “Pain Hustlers” is the starry, mostly-true story of a company called Insys, a key player in America’s ongoing opioid crisis.

In 2012, Insys launched a fast-acting spray called Subsys whose active ingredient was fentanyl. Guess what happened. People got hooked.

People died. Insys got rich. Liberally adapted by Wells Tower from Evan Hughes’ reporting on Insys, “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.

They used one of the industry’s more ethically dubious tactics, inviting doctors to participate in sketchy speaker programs — once a legitimate peer-to-peer marketing strategy, but effectively just a scam to siphon generous “honorariums” directly into the pockets of prescription-writing MDs (which, in Subsys’ case, included dentists and podiatrists).