David Yates’s Pain Hustlers puffs itself up as a dynamic epic about the American dream but ends up glorifying some truly grotesque characters. Wells Tower’s script pulls loosely from Evan Hughes’s book about how executives at pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics were convicted in 2019 of conspiring to bribe doctors to overprescribe the fentanyl spray Subsys. The story has every ingredient for gripping melodrama: greed, timeliness, money, drugs, death, betrayal, and an Icarus-like fall. Thomas Jennings’s Frontline episode “Opioids, Inc.” and the second part of Alex Gibney’s The Crime of the Century have already turned the sordid tale into powerful, infuriating nonfiction. But in the course of fictionalizing the Insys story, Yates and Tower lose sight of what made it compelling to begin with.
Though ostensibly about the 2010s’ epidemic of synthetic opioid overdoses, Pain Hustlers really hangs its story on the oh-so American grit and determination...
Though ostensibly about the 2010s’ epidemic of synthetic opioid overdoses, Pain Hustlers really hangs its story on the oh-so American grit and determination...
- 10/26/2023
- by Chris Barsanti
- Slant Magazine
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