| Netflix | Release Date: October 20, 2023 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
5
Mixed:
25
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews
Oct 27, 2023
Solid performances are overshadowed by chaos. Yates brought magic to the Wizarding World, while here, he stuffs Pain Hustlers with voiceovers, freeze frames, and black-and-white mockumentary talking heads. These are gimmicks that have been done before — and better — in films like The Big Short and now just feel derivative.
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Oct 20, 2023
Directed by David Yates, who has spent most of the last two decades helming “Harry Potter” movies and prequels and might not be the best fit for this material, Pain Hustlers aims to be a fast-paced, raucous, blunt and slick work a la “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short,” but winds up caught between the worlds of breezy satire and hard-hitting expose.
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Movie NationOct 30, 2023
As the folks in this rise and fall of Pharma Frauds saga could tell you, it’s the third act where all the consequences show up and the piper must be paid. That’s where this story’s make-or-break moments are parked, and there are too few of them to let it get off the screen with as much promise as it opened with.
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RogerEbert.comSep 15, 2023
By playing with formalism, using faux documentary, and cranking out hedonistic scenes of excessive drug taking and partying, Yates aims to blend “Erin Brockovich” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” But the director’s filmic language never offers quite enough sex, quite enough excess, quite enough of capitalism’s depravity. Pain Hustlers just doesn’t know how to commit.
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Oct 19, 2023
Pain Hustlers waits until very late in the game to really drive home some of the horrors behind the opioid epidemic. For too long we’re complicit with its characters. And maybe that’s what it’s going for; but if so, it left me with a mildly unpleasant aftertaste. Not quite what the doctor ordered.
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IndieWireSep 11, 2023
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.
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Sep 13, 2023
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.
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Sep 11, 2023
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.
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