As far as Wolf of Wall Street knockoffs dealing with healthcare scams go, Pain Hustlers is more coherent and morally sound than the rambling, ignominious (and similarly titled) Body Brokers. That makes it better than Body Brokers (damning faint praise, I know), but it doesn’t necessarily make Pain Hustlers good in and of itself.
Right off the bat we get the dreaded “inspired by real events” intertitle. My bullshit meter is already going through the roof, and that’s just the tip of the hogwash iceberg. In order to lend some verisimilitude to the proceedings, the filmmakers intersperse the action with black-and-white cutaway scenes of some of the characters being interviewed — though by whom and for whom, I haven’t the foggiest.
This device aims to kills two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it attempts to endow the story with a cinéma vérité feel; on the other, it is an Info Dump outlet. The question is, what the hell do you want two dead birds for? If you want to make a documentary, make a documentary. If you want to make a documentary but can’t be bothered with the facts, make a mockumentary. And if you want to make a narrative film, make a narrative film.
Pain Hustlers is mostly a narrative film, and it should have stuck to that. At the same time, it could have used a little — or a lot — less narration (flaccid, sloppy writing). Consider the scene in which “stripper” (the quotes are mine, since she never actually strips) Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) meets Pete Brenner (Chris Evans trying, and failing, to channel his inner Bradley Cooper).
Liza sizes Pete up (“if you’re in this shithole, you’re not finance. I’d say insurance, except your Ferragamos are too nice,” etc.) and correctly deduces that he is a “drug rep.” Cue Pete’s voice-over: “She had a gift for reading people.” No shit, Sherlock. We literally just saw Liza showing us her gift, so there’s no immediate need to also tell us about it.
If you got rid of the fourth wall-breaking vignettes, the movie would be shorter, even if ever so slightly (the more fat that you can trim out of a two-hour runtime, the better). And if you got rid of the redundant narration, Pain Hustlers would feel shorter as well. More importantly, it would be tighter, carry more urgency, and pack more power.
The story, a clichéd rags-to-riches-to-rags plot, could certainly stand to be told as directly and expeditiously as possible — and even that’s just the next best thing to not telling it at all. We all know the rise-and-fall formula well by now, and Pain Hustlers checks all the boxes: faustian bargain, hubris, epiphany, redemption, catharsis. The result, however, fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts.
The script also throws in a sick teenage daughter who faints and has seizures whenever the movie reckons we need to have our heartstrings tugged. I resent the calculated emotional manipulation, but at least young Chloe Coleman is a refreshing presence amid the humdrum familiarity of the whole affair (Andy García acquits himself equally and effortlessly well, furnishing his eccentric billionaire character with more shades and layers than the rest of the cast combined), and I did like that, among her symptoms, the screenplay includes a staring spell without feeling the obligation to explain what a staring spell is — a rare instance of subtlety in a film whose inner workings are otherwise as transparent as they are predictable.
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