Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as Richard Crouse reviews three movies in less time than it takes to wind a clock! Have a look as he races against the clock to tell you about David Fincher’s thriller “The Killer,” the mascot mayhem of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and Emily Blunt in “Pain Hustlers.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I joined CP24 to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres. Today we talk about David Fincher’s thriller “The Killer,” Emily Blunt in “Pain Hustlers,” the mascot mayhem of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and the John Cena action flick “Freelance.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I join CTV NewsChannel anchor Akshay Tandon to talk about David Fincher’s thriller “The Killer,” the mascot mayhem of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and Emily Blunt in “Pain Hustlers.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
“Pain Hustlers,” a new true crime dramedy based on the non-fiction book “The Hard Sell” by Evan Hughes, starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans, and now streaming on Netflix, joins the ever-growing list of movies and television shows that detail big pharma’s culpability in the opioid crisis.
Blunt plays Liza Drake, a broke single-mom to daughter Phoebe (Chloe Coleman). Kicked out of her sister’s garage, where they’d been sleeping for more than a month, Liza is desperate for a job and cash.
During a chance meeting with oily pharmaceutical sales rep Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), she impresses him with her tenacity. Sensing she’d do anything for a buck, he offers her a job, despite her complete lack of qualifications, selling a new, inhalable fentanyl-based pain killer directly to doctors.
“It’s a long-odds lottery buried under a thousand rejections,” he tells her.
To keep the job, all she has to do is get the ball rolling by convincing one doctor to prescribe the drug. Just under the deadline, she lands a whale, the morally compromised Dr. Lydell (Brian d’Arcy James) who hands out the drug to his patients like candy to kids at Halloween.
Liza’s piece of the action is more money than she ever could have imagined. “You’re not going to make a hundred K this year,” Brenner tells her. “It’s going to be more like six-hundred.”
Drunk on success—and frequent drinking binges—she bends laws and bribes doctors as she chants her mantra, “Own your territory,” to a growing legion of sales reps. But while her bank account swells, so do her doubts, as her conscience becomes her moral compass.
“Pain Hustlers” breathes much of the same air as “Dopesick,” “Painkiller” and the documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.” Some. But not all. Those stories focused on patients and the personal toll of the opioid epidemic. Conversely, “Pain Hustlers” turns the camera on the sales reps, the pharmaceutical pushers who made fortunes on the misfortune of others.
Liza’s shift from desperation to greed isn’t a particularly fresh take on the rags-to-riches tale, but Blunt works overtime to make her character compelling. Her desire to succeed, to improve her life isn’t simply about the Benjamins, it’s about creating a new start for her daughter. Blunt grounds the movie with ample humanity, anchoring the film’s often over-the-top antics with her earthbound presence.
To its detriment, “Pain Hustlers” has a lighter tone than other recent opioid dramas. It’s not exactly a laugh a minute, but the jocular tone seems at odds with the serious subject matter, particularly in the performances of Evans and Andy Garcia, whose character loses his mind and the audience’s attention midway through.
“Pain Hustlers” attempts a new take on a hot button topic, but, the formulaic execution and uneven tone feels wonky given subject matter.
A weekly feature from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest and most interesting movies! This week Richard looks at the kid’s action movie “My Spy,” the divorce drama “Hope Gap” and the political polarization of “The Hunt.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Richard sits in on the CJAD Montreal morning show with host Andrew Carter to talk about the weekend’s biggest releases including “My Spy,” the odd couple flick for kids, the controversial “The Hunt,” the adult drama “Hope Gap” and the wild supernatural comedy “Extra Ordinary.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
It is a rare comedy for kids that starts with explosions and the execution style deaths of bad guys, but here we are. “My Spy” is an action adventure co-starring a nine-year-old and a hulking action star in a story with no blood and guts but plenty of violence but also plenty of charm.
“Guardians of the Galaxy” star Dave Bautista is JJ, a tough talking mountain of a man whose closest friend is a fish named Blueberry. As a C.I.A. agent he gets the job done, usually in the least subtle way possible. After one action packed adventure he is assigned the relatively quiet gig of surveilling Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley), a single mother who was once married to a very bad man. Their mission is to gather information to determine if anything nefarious is happening inside the apartment.
When preteen Sophie (Chloe Coleman) discovers the camera’s in her mom’s apartment she tracks down JJ and his sidekick Bobbi (Kristen Schaal) in their “secret” apartment down the hall. Instead of being freaked out Sophie threatens to expose their operation unless JJ teaches her how to be a spy. As he clandestinely trains the youngster how to beat a lie detector and other 007 moves, he lets his bullet proof façade drop, becoming a father figure of sorts to Sophie and a love interest to Kate. “You opened up a part of me that has been closed for a long time,” he tells her.
When the baddies show up JJ and Sophie must team to keep Kate safe.
“My Spy” has many of the earmarks of a kid’s flick. There’s the young co-star, some silly humour and even a dance number of sorts at the end. It also has some bad language, violence and gunfire so keep the little ones away even if they are fans of the larger-than-life Drax the Destroyer’s more kid friendly adventures. Just as this movie is somewhere between a kid’s movie and an action film, the audience is best limited to tweens.
Bautista is following in the footsteps of other muscle-bound stars like Arnold “Kindergarten Cop” Schwarzenegger, Vin “The Pacifier” Diesel and Dwayne ” Tooth Fairy” Johnson in kid’s odd couple—big and burly, small and smart—films. The movies only work if there is chemistry between the leads and here the film’s biggest asset—and no, it’s not Bautista’s bulk—is the charming spark between Bautista and Coleman. The story is predictable, the villain is super evil and some scenes seem overly familiar (didn’t Schwarzenegger already speak to a class of kid in “Kindergarten Cop”?) but despite all that, it raises a laugh or three.
Bautista is funny here, he can do the physical stuff, deliver a one liner and doesn’t seem to be taking himself too seriously while Coleman delivers, presenting Sophie as naturally smart and independent.
“My Spy” owes a debt to the other tough guy babysitting movies that came before it but succeeds through personality over predictability.
