It's hard to take your eyes off Emily Blunt in the true-life Netflix caper Pain Hustlers, the actress in her brightest movie star prime, a rare lead role in a movie where she's not being chased by aliens. or, even worse. , being forced to joke with Dwayne Johnson. As one of our best and most versatile celebrities working today, it's frustrating that Blunt is also one of the least used, until this summer's Oppenheimer (where she struggles to make the most of her "wifey").
Her only “one of hers for her” option in recent years was 2020's absolutely baffling Wild Mountain Thyme, a film that not even she could save. Her magnetism is both a blessing and a curse here for director David Yates, because she gives his film a boost it doesn't deserve or always know what to do with, her performance rising far above anything he surrounds her.
Director: David Yates
Writers: Wells Tower, Evan Hughes
Stars: Emily Blunt, Chris Evans, Catherine O'Hara
For a brief period, the film attempts to operate at his same level. Inspired by a New York Times article by Evan Hughes that later became a book, it's the story of a failing pharmaceutical startup (a sinking ship in a shopping mall) run by an eccentric eccentric (Andy Garcia). Blunt plays Liza, a quick-thinking single mother who can't figure out how to make the most of her intellect, turns to body over brain to make money and takes a job at a strip club to make ends meet.
There she meets Pete (a miscast Chris Evans), who is attracted to and impressed by her and drunkenly suggests she take a job at the startup. To his surprise, she not only accepts his offer, but begins to excel in the role, pushing rival sales representatives out of the way and insisting on the lives of the doctors she is trying to seduce into prescribing her product. But the product she is promoting is a fentanyl-containing painkiller at a time when alarm bells had been raised but not fully heeded, and as she and the company begin to rise through the ranks, the wheels begin to fall. get out
While those wheels are still turning, the hustle and bustle is mostly involving, surprising us with the twisted details of an American system that puts too much control over people's well-being in the hands of those who care too little. Blunt is a captivating Erin Brockovich-lite, walking around doctor's offices flaunting her figure to those who underestimate her intelligence and flexing muscles rarely flexed for comedy, but Yates is no Soderbergh (the overwhelming majority of her career in the big screen has been dominated by Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts) and the film never moves with the same confidence as it does.
Also hampered by Netflix, the film feels as cheap and flat as a Kissing Booth sequel, a surreal mismatch compared to Blunt's brilliance. We're supposed to be wrapped up in the excess of it all as good fortune soars, but it's all too poor-looking for us to feel that excitement secondhand. Yates' decision to stitch together black-and-white interviews with the characters is also inexcusably bad, an attempt at style that only shows how little the film has going for it.
As the company declines, so does the film, and the inevitable fall is far less entertaining than the rise. The script, by author Wells Tower, is written in increasingly harsh handwriting, and while the scale of the opioid epidemic never stops being completely horrifying, the film doesn't leave the requisite jaw dropping, a weight it may have contained. the book. . Blunt remains committed to the end, but even she can't add luster to the drab final act, the pleasure of seeing her on screen replaced by the pain of another undeserving project.
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