Movie: Pain Hustlers (2023) Caution Spoiler Alert

 Pain Hustlers

Came out; 2023

Time; 2 hr 3 min

Watched: Netflix

Rated: R for language throughout, some sexual content, nudity and drug use

IMDB Rating; 6.5/10

Caution; Spoiler Alert

Staring;

Emily Blunt as Liza Drake

Chris Evans as Pete Brenner

Catherine O'Hara as Jackie

Chloe Coleman as Phoebe

Andy Garcia as Dr. Neel

Brian d'Arcy James as Dr Lydell

Story Line;

Dreaming of a better life for her and her young daughter, Liza Drake, a high-school dropout, lands a job with a failing pharmaceutical start-up in a yellowing strip mall in Central Florida. Liza's charm, guts and drive catapult the company and her into the high life, where she soon finds herself at the center of a criminal conspiracy with deadly consequences.

Thoughts:

I've watched all of these: Pain Killer, Dope Sick and Now Pain Hustlers.

I feel that these movies and series do a great job of showing how we all got into this opioid epidemic to being with. We can see the practices these companies followed and what the reps for forced to do in order to make money and sell the product.

What they all fail at is telling the story of people who are in daily pain who are suffering because medications are no longer available because of these practices. It doesn't highlight the people who are being left behind.

With so much information available now it really sucks to see the people suffering everyday aren't at all being mentioned in any of these!

This was good, the acting was great, the story line on par and the struggles of the companies and doctor's to keep up was very real.

CAUTION; Major Spoiler Alert

In 2011, Liza Drake (Emily Blunt ) is a struggling single mother working as an exotic dancer in Florida while raising her teenage daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman) and dealing with Phoebe's father who lives in Savannah. After meeting Pete Brenner (Chris Evans) at her club and having a friendly and casual conversation, he offers her a job paying $100,000 per year. Later, Liza is called into her daughter's school when her daughter and her friends are suspended for starting a fire near the campus. Liza takes Phoebe and her niece home, where she's living out of her sister's garage. After an argument about money her sister kicks her out and Liza and Phoebe move into a motel. Liza meets Camile and Sydney at the motel.

After her car is repossessed, Liza decides to take Pete up on his job offer and tracks him down to his office at pharmaceutical company Zanna. She is unaware that the cash-strapped start-up is having a hard time breaking into the market and is desperately scrambling for additional investors to fund a marketing push in the run-up to its planned IPO. Zanna's cancer pain relief medication has a market penetration of less than 1%, but Pete says it takes only 5 minutes to kick in and is not addictive like other pain medications in the market. Eric Paley is the CEO and believes that with a penetration of 22%, Zanna will be a $1 Billion valuation company. Larkin is the VP of Marketing. Pete looks at Liza's dismal resume and forges a more impressive curricula vitae, claiming she has a bachelor's degree in biochemistry. He then takes her to meet the founder of the company, Doctor Jack Neel (Andy García), who hires her immediately despite the company being on an apparent hiring freeze. Pete gives her a five-day probation to convince a major physician to prescribe their marquee drug, Lonafen. Pete tells Liza that she can $40,000 per month on a full dose sale for one patient. Dr. Lydell is a doctor who has prescribed over $9 million worth of pain medications for the competition in the last 12 months alone.

Liza goes through the entire list of potential clients in fewer than five days and fails to secure any prescriptions. Meanwhile, Phoebe experiences a seizure, and they learn she has CAVM. Thinking the job opportunity is over, she returns to the office of Dr. Lydell (Brian d'Arcy James), her first sales attempt to collect a piece of Tupperware she left with him and overhears a cancer patient and his wife discussing the poor side effects he's experiencing from a more commonly prescribed drug. After making a convincing and transparent case that Lonafen would be a better option for his patient, Lydell agrees to prescribe it.

Liza also invites him to help launch their speaker program wherein he can share his testimony about the drug's efficacy as a physician. But speaker programs require the company to pick up the expenses for the doctor to fly around to exotic locations and Zanna did not have the money. Larkin refuses to fund it, so Liza convinces Pete to fund it out of pocket and in exchange take the 10-point commission on Lydell sales directly, without going through the company. The event initially fails (as the whole thing was severely underfunded and nobody showed up), and Lydell nearly ends his relationship with Zanna despite his patient praising the drug, but Liza is able to salvage the situation and turn it into a proper speaker program. When Pete offers Lydell financial incentives ($4500 per week) to prescribe Lonafen, Lydell officially signs on.

A few days later Pete shows Liza that Lydell has been prescribing Lonafen as often as he can (he switches 40 patients in 3 days). Liza makes $600K in the first year. After her success with Lydell, a flood of new recruits arrives hoping to join Zanna as sales reps. Liza signs her mother Jackie on as a sales rep as well. The reps that Liza and Pete hired were Poor, Hungry and Desperate. None of them came from the Pharma background. After sending the team out into the field, Zanna rises to take 86% of the market share in the southeast.

Larkin (Jay Duplass) tries to expose Liza as a fraud for her resume that Pete doctored. This backfires and angers Neel who promotes Liza to National Sales Director and Pete to COO, the latter of whom immediately fires Larkin. Zanna launches the IPO and gives a 400% gain in 3 days. As Zanna continues to rake in profits, they move into a larger headquarters and Neel's eccentricities begin to manifest more clearly. During an executive meeting CEO Eric Paley (Amit Shah) makes suspicious comments, provoking Pete to aggressively frisk him where he finds his smartphone is recording the meeting. Paley claims he's just recording it as an insurance policy in case the company runs into legal trouble. Paley is fired but cashes in on his company shares and earns millions. Liza has $6 million in stock options but cannot sell the stock as they have 6 months still to vest. Neel grows angry and impatient when sales begin to flatten out, and pressures Liza and the sales team to push the drug off-label, marketing it for all types of pain, not just cancer (But the drug in only approved for use against cancer pain). He also instructs Liza to fire her mother Jackie (Catherine O'Hara), after he slept with her following a speaker program, whom Liza hired as a representative with the initial group.

Liza approaches Lydell with her new marching orders and is disappointed when he readily agrees to prescribe Lonafen off-label. Meanwhile, Phoebe experiences another seizure during a school rehearsal, and the doctor tells her about the arterial mass in Phoebe's brain has grown and she needs to have the surgery to have it removed. Liza attempts to offer her stock options in Zanna as collateral for a loan that will pay for Phoebe's surgery, but the bank denies her because of the volatility in the pharmaceutical industry. After Lydell is arrested in a DEA sting operation, Liza believes Zanna is finished as a company, and in desperation approaches Neel for financial help paying for the surgery. Neel instead exhorts her to use the crisis of Phoebe's situation as "fire" for inspiration, like he did when his wife was dying from cancer, and he came up with Lonafen.

After her friend Camille's husband Sidney dies from an overdose on Lonafen and Camille coldly rejects Liza's condolences, Liza decides to testify to the U.S. Attorney's office that's investigating Zanna. She admits that she helped build Zanna's speaker program and worked to bring their bribery program into compliance. When asked who else signed off on those programs she confirms the names given to her: Eric Paley, Pete Brenner, and Jack Neel. She's told testimony won't be enough and they ask for greater proof linking Neel to the criminal activity, which Liza explains is nearly impossible because Neel has insulated himself from the daily operations.

At the next speaker program Liza attempts to steal a printout from Pete's jacket but he catches her in the parking lot before she can leave and finds the printout in her purse. Pete is implicated and arrested, though Neel offers to take care of his family and assets while he's in prison. The FBI also catch up to Eric Paley and arrest him. While all of his executives were being arrested, Neel remained untouchable. Liza recalls her mom's earlier affair with Neel and asks how she corresponded with him. Jackie says he didn't give out his phone but gave her his email which she used to make her request for a commission increase that Neel wanted her fired for. Liza finds that Jackie had saved the emails and they served as the link between Neel and the illegal activities at Zanna.

In the U.S. Attorney's depositions, experts reveal that Lonafen is just Fentanyl which is why non-terminal patients who were prescribed the drug became addicted and often died from overdose. Lydell (40 months), Paley (16 months), Brenner (36 months), and Neel (66 months) all received fines and prison sentences. After a heartfelt apology given in court, and the U.S. Attorney's recommendation that Liza not serve a prison sentence in order not to discourage future whistle-blowers, the judge still sentences Liza to 16 months in prison, stating that her greed cost lives.

Fifteen months later Liza has been released early and has partnered with her mother and some of the original sales representatives from Zanna to form the cosmetics company that she and Jackie had envisioned when Liza was still living in her sister's garage. Liza considers that she almost never thinks about her former career with Zanna, except when she can't sleep. She'll dream about running Zanna as the CEO and saving it from the corruption that became its downfall, but she quickly abandons those thoughts because they scare her.