It’s always fun to see a mini-genre blooming, and right now we’re in the middle of a run of thrillers based on the boardroom machinations of big pharma companies. We’ve had Matthew Broderick creeping it up in Painkiller, Michael Keaton in Dopesick, and a whole blister pack of documentaries to keep us hooked too. Now, the trailer has dropped for Emily Blunt and Chris Evans’ new addition to the genre for Netflix, Pain Hustlers. Catherine O’Hara and Andy Garcia pop up too, and Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts’ David Yates is on directing duties. Watch it here:
Blunt is Liza Darke, a high school dropout who finds herself working at a cruddy pharmaceuticals company in a cruddy mall somewhere in cruddy Central Florida. But Evans’ Pete Brenner is a man with a plan to see them all make massive wads of cash, and Darke falls in line with him. “Cast the first stone if you will,” Darke says in the trailer. “But this is my story. And I did it for the right reasons.” It looks like Pain Hustlers is pitched somewhere between The Wolf Of Wall Street and Erin Brockovich: a plucky woman down on her luck gets sucked into a world of confidence tricks and extremely dodgy dealings. “Is that even legal?” asks Blunt’s Darke at one point. Sure, says Brenner: it’s just like doing a bit of minor, part-timers’ speeding. It’s nothing! “67 in a 65!”
The other big moment here is Andy Garcia – in an as-yet-unknown role – yelling, “GET THE SHOES OFF,” at someone in an airport and then bundling them over. We’ll see exactly who gets bundled over, and why they needed to GET THE SHOES OFF, when Pain Hustlers arrives on Netflix on 27 October.