Review: Novocaine

Director:  Dan Berk, Robert Olsen

Stars:  Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Betty Gabriel

What a fun time of year this is. Awards season is comfortably over. Summer IP saturation is a couple months away still, so now’s the time for weird/dumb studio and indie picks that didn’t fit the prestige model. Mid-budget, (mostly) original ideas seem to be back, baby. All of our mid-tier dreams have been answered. You only have to look at the release slate for April. The Amateur. The Accountant 2. Drop. A comfortable run of 6/10 bangers are ahead of us.

And Novocaine. Indie upstart filmmakers Dan Berk and Robert Olsen here make a bid for the mainstream with an eminently charming Deadpool variant, in which Jack Quaid stars as Nathan Caine, a well-intentioned assistant bank manager in San Diego who has a rare genetic deficiency that means he can’t feel pain. With tennis balls softening the edges of desks and drawers and all his food taken in liquid form so he doesn’t accidentally bite his tongue, it’s not been a rosy life for Nathan, but he’s gotten by. He is lonesome, though, spending most of his downtime playing online video games with his only friend Roscoe (Jacob Batalon). When his work crush, Sherry (Amber Midthunder), starts making overtures to him, he feels as though his life has turned a corner. Too bad she gets taken hostage by bank robbers the day after their promising first date. Emboldened by love, Nathan decides to take matters (and a cop car and a gun) into his own hands, and get her back.

Quaid’s a proven good-natured performer, and it’s nice to see him in a notable lead role after playing a couple of enjoyable douchebags in the likes of Scream (2022) and Companion. He makes Novocaine a breezy action comedy to get onboard with, and the film is at it’s most casually giving during the opening act, when it’s setting up the chemistry between Nathan and Sherry, and almost playing like a straightforward romcom. It feels as though we are in safe hands.

Things don’t exactly take a turn when the violence and car chases kick in, rather we shift into a more comfortably pedestrian middle ground in which Nathan’s nice guy sensibilities clash humorously with taking down street toughs. I’d take a thousand hours of Quaid’s folksy naivety over ten minutes more of Ryan Reynolds’ coquettish snark. But Novocaine rarely tests itself, and Berk and Olsen show little ambition to take the staging beyond anything you might find in a slapstick sitcom. Novocaine never dazzles, content to coast on a washing line of quirky encounters, most of which have been blown already by the movie’s various trailers.

While it passes the time just fine, one can’t shake the sense that the screenplay has squandered some of it’s potential, particularly with regards to Sherry’s situation as a hostage, which spills the beans on a rather juicy reveal about an hour too early. Her captors – the bank robbing trio – are also exceedingly forgettable. Generic thugs who you’ll have forgotten before the credits role. Ray Nicholson tries to put some effort into nominal head honcho Simon, but it still doesn’t really stick. Betty Gabriel is serviceable as the detective mopping up in Nathan’s wake, but it’s kinda weird that she’s played a cop on the trail of a vigilante who feels no pain twice now. That’s some niche typecasting.

If the action set pieces hit a bit of a glass ceiling, it’s clear Berk and Olsen are more interested in the laughs, and there are plenty to see us through. Novocaine overruns, however, and when it makes a late bid for a dramatic crescendo, all the extensive harm dished out to the unfeeling Nathan comes to feel a tad sadistic and a little tired. A mid-film torture sequence in which Nathan has to play-act agony showcases Quaid’s comic flare, but it raises a queasy question about our participation in extremely violent scenes. If there’s no pain to wince over, if we’re inured to the horror, what are our (and the filmmakers’) motivations for such explicit bloodletting? Novocaine keeps things moving to take our minds off the question, but it lingers like a bad aftertaste once the movie’s done. A faint sensation like we’ve eaten something a little off.

But perhaps I’m looking too hard here. This is intended, clearly, as a live action cartoon. Characters are drawn to match. Nathan modestly shakes off Sherry’s exclamation that he’s a superhero, but that’s essentially what he is, and the kind of movie Novocaine amounts to. The ending more or less beams at the audience for permission to mount a sequel. I’d be okay with that, as this is all – for the most part, and ironically – harmless. But whether I’d call it necessary is another matter.

Also, what the hell, this is a Christmas film? Spring’s already crazy this year. Here’s to the next 6/10…