Tag: Chris Evans

Screening Room: ‘Pain Hustlers’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, streamingLeave a comment

My review of the new movie Pain Hustlers is at Slant:

David Yates’s Pain Hustlers puffs itself up as a dynamic epic about the American dream but ends up glorifying some truly grotesque characters. Wells Tower’s script pulls loosely from Evan Hughes’s book about how executives at pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics were convicted in 2019 of conspiring to bribe doctors to overprescribe the fentanyl spray Subsys. The story has every ingredient for gripping melodrama: greed, timeliness, money, drugs, death, betrayal, and an Icarus-like fall. Thomas Jennings’s Frontline episode “Opioids, Inc.” and the second part of Alex Gibney’s The Crime of the Century have already turned the sordid tale into powerful, infuriating nonfiction. But in the course of fictionalizing the Insys story, Yates and Tower lose sight of what made it compelling to begin with…

If you want the better nonfiction take I mentioned, The Crime of the Century is on HBO. If not, Pain Hustlers is on Netflix right now.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Gray Man’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Film - New, streamingLeave a comment

Netflix’s next big bet to produce $200 million blockbusters to stream on the small screen is the Russo brothers’ The Gray Man, an assassin-versus-assassin thriller with Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling that shows a sharp drop-off in quality and imagination from the Russos’ MCU movies.

The Gray Man streams on Netflix tomorrow. My review is at Slant:

If all you knew about the C.I.A. was what you saw in Anthony and Joe Russo’s The Gray Man, you would think it was solely devoted to assassination. The entire plot of the film revolves around the psychopathic Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans) trying to take out his former colleague, Court Gentry (Ryan Gosling), a.k.a Sierra Six, after the latter uncovers unsavory secrets about the agency, which wants to eliminate every trace of Sierra, a poorly considered program that turns convicted murderers into government-sanctioned killers. If this sounds like the plot of every Jason Bourne film, that’s because it basically is…

Here’s the trailer:

New on DVD: ‘Snowpiercer’ is Revolution on a High-Speed Train

On By chrisbarsantiIn DVD - Film, Graphic NovelsLeave a comment

'Snowpiercer': We'd like a seat in first class, please (Anchor Bay)
‘Snowpiercer’: We’d like a seat in first class, please (Anchor Bay)

snowpiercer-dvdBong Joon-ho is a South Korean director who isn’t a household name in the States but by all rights should be. In his newest film, Snowpiercer, he imagines a quasi-steampunk post-apocalyptic thriller that’s also a handy little morality tale about class inequality.

Snowpiercer is available now on DVD and Blu-ray. My review is at PopMatters:

The physics of Snowpiercer’s futuristic plot are as stripped-down as the backstory is convoluted. Every human being left alive is on board one train snaking across the frozen wasteland. First class is up front, replete with late Roman Empire consumption and a mindset best described as rave-club Borgia. Everybody else is crammed cheek-to-jowl in the filthy back of the train. Those in back want to get up front. All that stands between them are many locked doors, squads of malevolent guards, years of social conditioning, and Tilda Swinton acting like a toothy Margaret Thatcher after one too many gin and tonics…

You can see the trailer here: