Novocaine
As Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) sits down for an impromptu dinner date with his new workplace crush Sherry (Amber Midthunder), he tentatively explains why he cannot partake of the pie she teases him with. He is a rare sufferer of Congenital Sensitivity to Pain and Anhidrosis, and he cites the (real) life expectancy for sufferers (25) with a sad note of forced cheer, though he’s made it further than most. His parents, as he tells it, kept him effectively locked up for much of his life, to the point that he retains a fussy form of solitude into adulthood and has no friends, save for the chatty gamer with whom he enjoys an entirely online correspondence (Jacob Batalon). One of the chief rules governing Nate’s humdrum life as co-manager of a bank is a firm avoidance of solid foods, for fear he’d bite his own tongue off.
It’s a sobering launchpad for director Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s Novocaine, a movie that otherwise harbours little ambition besides serving up a proudly stupid confection in the time-honoured tradition of action-comedies centred on anonymous office drones finding their inner ass-kicker. To ground this framework within a real-life, often fatal disorder sounds a discordant note, providing both the frisson that powers the movie into life and the fatal flaw that keeps it firmly earthbound. Novocaine evinces very little real curiosity surrounding how someone like Nate’s life may truly be managed around their disorder on a daily basis. Indeed, on the face of it, there seems to be little difference between the way Nate conducts himself and the manner of any diffident rom-com lead in need of learning that “confidence is key” in putting himself out there. It’s no less unpersuasive as a love story, since the soul-deep connection between Nate and Sherry is something viewers are largely expected to take as a given without much supporting evidence. What really energises Berk and Olsen is the giddy, teenage boy conviction that it would be wild (and, like, SO overdue) for someone to make an action movie founded on this premise.
Nate will take many a beatdown over the course of Novocaine once some Yuletide-themed bank robbers kidnap Sherry and leave him in impulsive hot pursuit. However, his unique capacity for bouncing back will come in handy, and his imperviousness to pain will serve him well in the utilisation of compound fractures as weapons and being un-susceptible to seemingly deadly booby traps. In the movie’s funniest scene – too brief, and like much of the movie’s best moments, given away wholesale by the trailer – a torture session with a new nemesis will become an endurance test for Nate more out of tedium than the assumed physical agony his adversary hopes to inflict. Little of this could be described as witty, but each action scene still comes alive with the endearing, improvisational drive to keep finding new, unorthodox ways for Nate to get the upper hand in a tight spot. For a time, that – and Quaid’s bumbling charm – is enough to keep Novocaine chugging along agreeably, but it’s not enough to sustain itself to the end. The film is simply too incurious, too content to keep its characters as quarter-realised sketches to become much more.
Berk, Olsen and screenwriter Lars Jacobson’s work is not wholly insincere, but its sincerity is only halfway there. It has a mean streak, but could honestly afford to be nastier. It strains for laughs, but the biggest laugh it has comes with the least effort. Matt Walsh, in a wholly thankless role as the partner of the cop on Nate’s trail (Betty Gabriel), takes stock of a scene that leaves behind a single, Santa-dressed corpse. “It would be terrible if that was the real Santa,” he notes with hangdog despair.
Ultimately, Novocaine is most effective as a vehicle for Quaid, who taps into a winning blend of nervy nebbish and slick salesman patter. If only there were a real sense of purpose underpinning the whole, emotional or otherwise. In its absence, Novocaine settles for a pleasant disposability that feels designed for swift evaporation. As befitting its hero, it’s wholly painless.
Thomas Messner
Novocaine is released nationwide on 28th March 2025.
Watch the trailer for Novocaine here:
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