'Pain Hustlers' Tells a Sadly Familiar Story With a Kitchen-Sink Style

The wife of a man who nearly died of an opioid overdose comes bursting into the office of the sleazy doctor who prescribed it, wrongly, in exchange for personal gain. She slugs the doctor, in her agony.

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The scene comes deep into the new Netflix film “Pain Hustlers,” and it feels bracingly real and tragic.

If only the rest of the movie, the latest in a string of opioid-themed films, felt the same. Instead, despite a high-powered cast featuring a reliably solid Emily Blunt, an expertly lowlife Chris Evans and the gifted Catherine O’Hara, the film tries too hard to be something it isn’t, or shouldn’t be: slick and breezy and too clever for its own good, filled with mockumentary interviews, wild montages, and other tricks used to more disciplined effect in more accomplished films.

Not that Blunt isn’t an effective presence here as Liza Drake, a struggling, single Florida mom who works at a strip club but wants to move up in life — to be treated with respect, and to support her ailing teen daughter and her flighty mother. Indeed, Blunt carries the film with her intelligent and likable presence.

But that speaks precisely to the other big problem with the film, which is directed by “Harry Potter” vet David Yates and inspired by the article and book by Evan Hughes, telling the real-life tale of an opioid startup that intentionally mis-marketed a fentanyl spray meant for severe cancer pain. Here, the bare bones are the same, but Yates and screenwriter Wells Tower invent their own corrupt company and their own characters.