Ticketworthy! - Novocaine

Not every movie can be, or should be, some deep, intellectual masterpiece. Sometimes you just want to go to the theater, buy a big bag of buttery popcorn, and watch a guy who can’t feel pain get the absolute hell beat out of him in increasingly stupid and unlikely ways. For times like those, the universe gives us movies like Novocaine.

Jack Quaid stars as Nathan Caine, an assistant bank manager who has a genetic condition that makes him unable to feel heat, cold, or any kind of pain. He lives in constant fear of accidentally hurting himself and not realizing it, to the point he won’t even eat solid food because if he accidentally bit his tongue off, he wouldn’t notice. Nathan meets Sherry (Amber Midthunder), a teller at his bank that he’s pretty sure is the love of his life, and things seem to be looking up. Until, that is, Sherry gets kidnapped by some bank robbers and it’s up to Nathan to save her. Does he have any skills? No. Does he know what he’s doing? Definitely not. He can take a punch, though. And somehow, that makes for a pretty entertaining movie.

Part of the reason it’s entertaining is Quaid. He has sharp comedic timing, charm, and an admirable dedication to the bit that sells the premise probably better than it deserves. When it comes to leading men that are a mix of awkward, goofy, and likeable, it’s quickly becoming apparent that you can’t do much better than Jack Quaid. It’s nice to see him flexing his action chops a bit here, something he hasn’t done much of outside of his show The Boys. I won’t say that the action scenes are amazing, though I was impressed by just how brutal some of them got, but Quaid does a great job keeping them fun and lighthearted despite some of the brutality.

The rest of the cast does fine in limited roles, but the movie wisely knows that Nathan is where it needs to keep the attention. Amber Midthunder, who some might recognize from her amazing work in 2022’s Prey, does have a few fun moments and it’s nice to see her hamming it up a bit and having fun, but spending any extra time on her or away from Nathan would probably have gotten tedious. It’s just not that kind of movie.

Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen also deserve some praise for their ability to balance the humor and the violence. It would have been easy to make the movie too comedic and undermine the action, or too violent and make the audience more uncomfortable than amused. Instead, they strike a perfect balance between the two and the audience never has to feel bad about laughing while Nathan gets more broken bones and puncture wounds.

I don’t think Novocaine is going to be a movie anyone is raving about, or maybe even talking about a few months from now. Its plot is silly and mostly seems like a series of excuses to get its lead character into ridiculous fight after ridiculous fight. All the twists and turns are predictable, and none of the characters outside of Nathan are terribly memorable. None of that matters, though, because the directors and Quaid make the whole thing so much fun that all the flaws are easy to ignore. Just don’t think too much about it.