Where I Watched It: HBO MAX

English Audio Description?: Yes

I believe this was a Sundance acquisition. I’m not sure if the early release date reflects how they feel about its chances on actually getting an Oscar nomination for Documentary feature, but in a year full of documentaries about celebrities, at least this wasn’t that. However, in a world where we keep seeing shows and movies centered around the opioid epidemic, I almost wonder if this did what it needed to.

Last year, I was disappointed by All The Beauty and the Bloodshed, because it was much more of the story of a person than the crusade against the Sackler family. I kind of needed it to be more of the latter, and American Pain certainly is more focused on its targets. I think they’re focused on them for the Tiger King effect of us being attracted to stupid people doing dumb things. The twin brothers featured in this documentary may have managed to run successful pain clinics for a period of time, but they were doing some ridiculous shit. I’m sure there were other pain clinics, run by far more boring people. But we get the guys who keeps throwing stars in the doctors office.

That’s kind of really what you need to know. Two guys, who were born with a silver spoon, for whatever reason seemed incapable of holding down an actual job, and had multiple run ins with the law. However, they still opened a pain clinic, one so popular that people were bussing down from Kentucky to get their drugs.

It’s still horrifying when you think how casually these two contributed to the detriment of society, and this documentary does capture the investigation that brought them down. So, the documentary does do what it achieves, it just feels less like they found some deep dark secret, and more like they wanted to tell a story about the guys who had a pool table in the doctor’s office. Seriously, I cannot stress how dumb these two come across.

There have been so many great expose style documentaries that have really felt like they uncovered something just by being documentarians. The Cove, while not on the same topic, felt like a clandestine operation to achieve the truth that no one else had managed to capture. Here, we just follow two people I’m fairly certain hashtagged every moment of their crimes.

It’s good, but Dopesick was better.

Final Grade: B+