Please bear with me here because this is a bit of a winding road. The Netflix comedy/drama “Pain Hustlers” is a fictionalized and highly stylized adaptation of Evan Hughes’ 2022 book “The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup,” based in part on a 2018 article Hughes wrote for the New York Times Magazine, which chronicled the crash-and-burn story of Insys Therapeutics, the pharma company that went to extreme and criminal lengths to market and sell Subsys, a fentanyl-based liquid spray.
Directed by David Yates, who has spent most of the last two decades helming “Harry Potter” movies and prequels and might not be the best fit for this material, “Pain Hustlers” aims to be a fast-paced, raucous, blunt and slick work a la “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Big Short,” but winds up caught between the worlds of breezy satire and hard-hitting expose.
