Carried by a typically strong Blunt performance, Pain Hustlers is both watchable and eye-opening, even though its dramatic impulses do kind of cancel each other out.

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 truth. Emily Blunt and Chris Evans are fabulous but you'll be hard-pressed to remember anything else by the time the credits are done rolling.

But the movie does succeed in unpacking the raw grift and exploitation of the pharma sales business, and the wider dysfunction of the American health care and legal systems that allows it to go unchecked. So a thumbs up on that part.

My Rating: 6.5/10.

In style & content, inspired-by-truth pharma-scandal drama "Pain Hustlers" feels like it's been made many times before. Struggling single-mum Emily Blunt (daughter of Catherine O'Hara) takes a low-level sales job in Chris Evans, Andy Garcia, Amit Shah & Jay Duplass' small pain-drug company, which she saves from closure, then turns into a massive overnight success via dubious, immoral & ultimately illegal methods of 'recruiting' doctors to write scripts & bump up prescriptions. It's polished (by fine blockbuster director David Yates) but the Wells Tower screenplay and Blunt & Evans performances are tired. Big Pharma sucks - ok Hollywood, we got the memo, enough.

Like some other posters I am at a loss to discern why this got poor reviews. It's well made, has a great cast and is a pertinent moral tale. Blunt is the star of course and she carries the film along with Chris Evans. Based on a true story it exposes the corruption in the pharmaceutical industry that fosters greed and profit over the actual health of America's citizens. Once Blunt's character, her fellow sales people and all the immoral doctors involved in prescribing pain meds get hooked on huge payouts, no one cares about the damaged lives that resulted. It's very entertaining and very sobering and justice prevails.