Pain Hustlers stars Emily Blunt and Chris Evans as a pair of prescription drug pain med peddlers. It shows how maybe some good intentions almost got in the way of all that money. Only in America, amiright?

I watched this Netflix film confused about where the terrible movie was. I rather enjoyed its energetic pace and devil-may-care opportunism. Is it glamorizing these bottom feeders? Yes, at first. But we love Wolf of Wolf Street and I didn’t actually want to blow up a pipeline in How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

Perhaps I failed to hate it because I haven’t seen the similar tv series that preceded it. All I know is that Emily Blunt and Chris Evans (who I didn’t even realize was Chris Evans at first) were very good. They pumped up the film’s energy and Blunt creates an interesting, complicated character. I found it exciting and thrilling. For the first half.

The second half makes some mistakes. It really wants to make sure we know Emily Blunt’s character is one of the good ones (even if she did bad). I liked her character so much, I kept having to remind myself the movie is called Pain Hustlers. It was like someone in Hollywood decided we needed an actual good guy in this movie about bad guys.

Plus the federal investigation felt abrupt and perfunctory… which befit the focus of the movie being on the pain hustlers, I suppose. They would have had little knowledge of what was going on outside their bubble… but it felt like a part of the movie was missing.

So I’m very much on the side of the movie for well over half its runtime. The second half needed some work and the courage to just be about the bad guys. But otherwise, it’s a solid, energetic film about a very bad situation.

Score: 80