Pain Hustlers (2023) review

Pole dancer and single mother Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), whose daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman) has a problem with her brain that requires expensive surgery, meets Pete Brenner (Chris Evans) at a strip club and he offers her a job to work as a salesperson for the pharmaceutical company Zanna, which is owned by Dr. Neel (Andy García), and try to convince doctors to prescribe their trademark drug Lonafen ... but when that starts causing people to overdose, Liza turns against them.  The topic is very timely and highlights a crisis going on in the United States with opioid addiction, but it's been covered several other places (the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Dopesick on Hulu, Painkiller on Netflix and so on) and there are entirely too many coincidences here to keep it trudging towards the inevitable Fed Crackdown.  It's also hard to have any sympathy for these individuals, and that includes Ms. Drake: every pusher knows what the product can do and ignorance isn't an excuse.  While we're already aware of Blunt's talent, this just goes to show Evans' range: he can go from doing a superhero movie to a comedy and then from being a "good dad" to an office sleaze quite efficiently.