What’s happening to Chris Evans? You can see him there, face etched into towering rock, part of the dubious new Mount Rushmore we call the “Hollywood Chrises”. Alongside Chrises Pratt, Pine and Hemsworth, Evans is part of a cadre of anointed white men to have dominated multiplex screens over the past decade and a half, largely thanks to his role as Captain America in Marvel’s box-office-catnip superhero franchise. He crawled out of the Marvel machine in 2019 after Avengers: Endgame, and has thrown himself into a variety of projects – most recently, Netflix’s new pharma drama Pain Hustlers, alongside Emily Blunt. Shrugging off Captain America, however, was the easy part. Now comes everything else.
In Pain Hustlers, Evans plays a sleazy pharmaceutical executive peddling an addictive new pain medication. The film has shot to No 1 on Netflix, but you’d have to do a bit of searching to find a reviewer who’d prescribe watching it – a damning 24 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes renders the diagnosis clear. For his part, Evans is just about fine, slipping gamely into the sort of slick-talking dirtbag mode he’s previously deployed – with minor tweaks – in films such as Fantastic Four and Knives Out. But it’s nonetheless a forgettable effort from the actor, and follows a run of similarly insipid projects: action-romance Ghosted with Ana de Armas; colourless thriller The Gray Man opposite Ryan Gosling; instantly memory-holed Pixar spin-off Lightyear. Unmoored from the infrastructure of Marvel Studios, Evans is spinning in the wind.
