There’s money to be made if you don’t care who suffers for it — a concept that proves to be financially fertile ground for Chris Evans and Emily Blunt in the highly anticipated crime drama Pain Hustlers.
Netflix dropped a new trailer for the David Yates-helmed project on Tuesday, which stars the A-listers as pharmaceutical sales reps pushing opioids in a story based on real events.
This new trailer gives fans a glimpse into the struggling life of high school dropout Liza Drake (Blunt), who is getting by in life through her simple mantra, “I will not give up on myself.”
Soon, she finds a ray of hope when she applies for a job at a floundering pharmaceutical start-up in Florida, run by the seemingly unscrupulous Pete Brenner (Evans), who gives Liza a chance — a gamble that pays off as they build the company of pharmaceutical sales reps into a small empire.
“There is nothing so inspiring as sheer desperation,” Liza says, while reaping the benefits of selling hard and fast — namely, more money than she’s ever had.
Liza must juggle the shenanigans that come along with dealing with her increasingly unhinged boss (Andy Garcia), the worsening medical condition of her daughter (Chloe Coleman) and a growing awareness of the devastation the company is causing.
Liza is forced to examine her career choices as the consequences of her actions begin to unravel her high-earning, hard-partying lifestyle — and federal agencies begin moving in on aspects of their operation.
With a frenetic energy evocative of The Wolf of Wall Street, and a quiet desperation permeating every frame, Pain Hustlers is bringing some real heat to the genre of opioid epidemic dramas.
Pain Hustlers was written by Wells Tower, adapted from Evan Hughes’s 2018 article published in The New York Times Magazine and the subsequent book Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup. Netflix secured worldwide distribution rights to the film at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
Pain Hustlers is in select theaters Oct. 20 and streaming Oct. 27 on Netflix.
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