Pain Hustlers feels like a retreading of the same ground covered in other recent works, bringing nothing especially new to the table and, in splitting the stylistic difference between slick/breezy and poignant/authentic, succeeding fully at neither.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 30, 2023

It's plenty entertaining, but not particularly thoughtful — just enough depth to fill a prescription pad, not a whole book.

| Original Score: B- | Oct 30, 2023

Pain Husters manages to avoid feeling like an Adam McKay remake of Dopesick, but its shifting tone never quite hits the right notes.

| Original Score: C+ | Oct 27, 2023

Emily Blunt is so emotionally present that she almost redeems the movie. She doesn’t, but she at least makes the first half of “Pain Hustlers” watchable.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 27, 2023

There is no guts to Pain Hustlers’ try-hard gonzo-ness, resulting in a sub-Scorsese style that both underlines and loses its point.

| Oct 27, 2023

The movie is constrained by its own conscience, thriving when Evans’s marvelously feral Pete is unleashed to dress like a Lonafen spray and rap about sales commissions, only to pivot apologetically from corporate bacchanals to suffering victims.

| Oct 27, 2023

It’s hard to extend much credit for the subject matter when it’s exploited for a “wild ride” that isn’t even wild, hawking a true story that isn’t even true.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 26, 2023

The excitement that the film tries to generate for its main characters is disturbingly glib.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 26, 2023

In the end, the movie acts much like its characters: It diverts the viewer’s attention with gaudy visuals and melodramatic plot points instead of ever coming close to telling a single uncomfortable truth.

| Oct 26, 2023

It does want you to feel horrible about the loss of life while presenting it through the filter of a warped, irony-saturated Horatio Alger story, however, and that’s where the wild ride of it all gets too bumpy for its own good.

| Oct 26, 2023

Some decent performances and an interesting topic can't prevent the overdose of clichés

| Original Score: 5.8/10 | Oct 26, 2023

Needing to follow a protagonist whose sympathies the film can leverage at any point blunts whatever judgment it wants to cast on its characters—and the broader history it’s trying to depict.

| Original Score: C | Oct 25, 2023

The screenplay hopscotches all over and the film wastes a great slimy performance from Evans and a decent, if unremarkable, one from the normally terrific Blunt.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Oct 25, 2023

It offers the bones of a compelling story, but one-note characters, riskless storytelling and creaky pacing prevent this film from making an impact. This is a prescription best left unfilled.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 25, 2023

The film takes no creative risks while leaning into all the cliches. There’s just nothing new here.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 24, 2023

It’s predictable but glossily watchable.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 22, 2023

Blunt is on fire, co-star Chris Evans is serviceable, and Andy Garcia is a hoot as the imperious, eccentric, billionaire boss.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 20, 2023

A well-acted and initially gripping story that loses momentum about halfway through and undergoes severe and often implausible shifts in tone.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 20, 2023

A real-life story with social issues about capitalism that is entertaining and funny while it makes you think, without being too earnest and serious.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 17, 2023

Pain Hustlers manages to be lively and moving, while also illuminating exactly how broken the American health care system is and how all of us are caught in its claws.

| Sep 30, 2023