A documentary about Martin Shkreli? Sure, why not? The guy briefly became "the most hated guy in America". He drew attention to pharmaceutical price gouging with his own cack-handed attempt at the rort. He was convicted of securities fraud. And his weirdness alone should almost guarantee a watchable film. Unfortunately, Pharma Bro manages to take everything interesting about Shkreli and squander it in a muddle-headed exercise in something that veers wildly between trolling and hero-worship. Director Brent Hodge does himself no favours in putting himself front and centre in this half-arsed search for answers about Shkreli. In fact, he starts to seem like a mini-me Martin, as needy, as self-absorbed, as irrational and as amoral as Shkreli himself. For commentary on he relies heavily on the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos (someone as widely loathed as Shkreli), a rapper friend of Shkreli's who turns out not to be that much of a friend, an ex-girlfriend who wasn't even that much of a girlfriend and a WuTang Clan rapper so incoherent that he should have been subtitled. None of it is very revealing. Hodge actually seems to have a secret crush on Shkreli, which is the only way to interpret his efforts to paint Shkreli as a colourful cartoon super-villain - a kind of cross between Lex Luthor and The Joker. It's a cute conceit, but it does little to illuminate the seriously awful things Shkreli did, much less shed any light on Shkreli's motivations or personality flaws. Pharma Bro feels a bit like documentary-making for the TikTok generation. But even that makes it sound more interesting than it is. Don't waste your time.
