It's a nine, instead of a 10 out of 10. This movie doesn't spend every moment on high glamour shots, though it could have with this tale. It doesn't need to for this genre, as the story itself is a sensationalization of a blockbuster true story. Th there a lot of stories coming out about the big players in the opiate epidemic. I think this one is important because it shows more than just the executive and accounting and lifestyle side. We actually get very little lifestyle outside of the company actions, which I appreciate. Also, it shows ways that legal fentanyl managed to penetrate the market for off-label pain management prescriptions. The acting is well done, the casting fits, and it's well told. I like this style of narratives based on a true story. "I, Tonya" did this too, where they have little cut ins of the people who consulted on the movie, which are also characters in the story of course. Allows them to give you little tastes of what the people are like, but also highlights that this is a fictional
Account of a real thing, as told by public sources and the people in the story telling the story they want told. It's clever and it's entertaining
Well made movie about an interesting and important subject. Doesn't feel like a documentary, but in a good way. And I love documentaries.
It also illuminates something that happens in most corporations' decisions, but which can be a dangerous mindset in the dark. Which is that a demand by stockholders for growth in a company, rather than strong corporate governance practices and market share resilience, can drive executives (who tend to get a large portion of their pay in shares) to drive the demand into adjacent markets. In the health sector, this would be patient groups.
Combine this with a strategy that does make sense for most companies, but here became the framework the pill mills could be built on: targeting the smaller doctor practitioners who weren't being courted by the Big pharma reps. Less expensive marketing, which is good because it allows small and midsize companies to compete in the market at all, but doctors whose patient volume and share of advanced cancer patients is going to be smaller because they have less patients in general, and because the larger doctors and hospital groups will be doing other care for many of these types of patients and often handle the pain management as well. I'm sure you can see how this could easily lead to patients finishing up cancer care or specialist care or experiencing side effects from cancer treatments they want to have documented but wouldn't need an oncologist appt for, hitting up their local Dr to see what can be done. This doctor will see them after the cause of the pain subsides. How can it even be determined properly that, when taking a pain medicine-which doesn't target specific pain-you can tell when the pain subsides to not need it? After all, taking this stuff chronically leads to feeling pain from withdrawal when you don't have it. Which feels just like, well, pain. It's a difficult situation. But greed at the small level scales too.