The Placebo effect: when a concentrated, harmless pill produces the same intended effects as the real thing because of the psychological belief that it is the real thing. You can’t get sick from a placebo, and you can’t take too much of them but it won’t make you any better (here’s my disclaimer that I am not a licensed physician – I just play one on TV). Why mention placebos in a review of Pain Hustlers, the new film directed by David Yates, beyond the film’s medical subject matter? Because, much like a placebo, the Netflix film functions as a concentrated, harmless piece of content that produces the same intended effects as a real film with something – anything – interesting to say.

It’s a film, written by Wells Tower and based on Evan Hughes’ New York Times Magazine article, that frequently tries to emulate films like The Wolf of Wall Street or The Big Short in style and tone, but fails to recognize what made those films memorable. It recalls the true story of a struggling pharmaceutical company in 2011 through the eyes of Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), a single mom who’s plucked from a strip club by Pete Brenner (Chris Evans) to being a drug rep tasked with pushing the product. The medicine is a fentanyl-based drug meant to ease the pain of cancer patients, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that’s lived in America since 2011 that it quickly becomes unsustainably popular. Of course, the problem is exacerbated by Drake and Brenner’s unethical marketing tactics of essentially paying doctors to write prescriptions for their product over their competitors.

There’s a tossed-off moment early on when Brenner espouses that every other pharmaceutical company applies the same practices, which could have been an interesting avenue for Pain Hustlers to go towards – that is, the systemic failure of our healthcare system by valuing profits over care. Instead, the film mostly focuses on Liza’s rise to the top, and how she’s essentially overlooking the harmful side effects of the opioids she’s pushing. But she’s not portrayed as a power-hungry monster a la Jordan Belfort, joyfully stepping on the little guy on her way up the corporate ladder. One of the film’s few bright spots arrives when the company is expanding and hiring more drug reps: rather than hiring experienced people with medical expertise, they look to people similar to Liza, people that were suckered in to multi-level marketing schemes and scraped through life without getting anywhere.

But this is the only moment of introspection the film takes beneath the surface of these characters over the course of 122 minutes. Drake and Brenner are two-dimensional pawns, never establishing themselves with a specific worldview. Blunt does the best she can, but she made a more dramatic impact with her limited screen time in Oppenheimer than she does here, where she’s center stage. Pain Hustlers fits right in with most of Evans’ post-MCU filmography, in that it will premiere on a streaming service and mostly be forgotten shortly after it drops. Yates, having escaped the Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts franchise, doesn’t exert much of a unique voice or style when the material gets more and more stale. Perhaps Craig Gillespie or – god help us – Adam McKay could have injected some life into Pain Hustlers.

Being one of the defining crises of our lifetimes, the spotlight should absolutely be given to the opioid epidemic, both from the victims and the people that caused it. The problem is that it’s already been well-worn territory long before Pain Hustlers premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, not just in entertainment but hard-hitting journalism and podcasts. It’s not the worst piece of content Netflix will put out this year, but it never doesn’t feel like a placebo, much like a large portion of Netflix’s original library. You can’t get sick from watching Pain Hustlers, but it won’t make you any better.

Pain Hustlers will be released on Netflix on October 27.

OSCAR POTENTIAL:

• None.