Arts & Culture

Novocaine
Where: In theatres
What: Movie; 110 mins.
When: Fri., March 14
Genre: Action/Thriller/Comedy
Rating: NNN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: Novocaine is a serviceable action flick, and Jack Quaid does a fantastic job embodying the everyman forced to extreme points when he takes off after the bank robbers that kidnap his girlfriend. However, the story suffers by breaking its own in-universe rules for the sake of plot armour, and some resolutions are a bit too tidy.

NOVOCAINE IS AN action comedy with more than its fair share of gore. The premise — a man who feels no physical pain takes on a violent gang to save the girl of his dreams — practically demands that we see just how much damage the man is capable of receiving, and the answer is: a LOT.

Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid playing the titular Novocaine, a childhood nickname) feels no pain due to a genetic condition — a real-world disorder called congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA). This leads him to take unusual steps in his everyday life to avoid potential harm from unknown injuries — until he is forced to reckon with how far he’s willing to go to save someone he loves.

When a vicious gang of bank robbers — led by the sociopathic Simon (Ray Nicholson) — kidnaps his crush-turned-girlfriend, Sherry (Amber Midthunder), during a hold-up, Nathan finds himself taking advantage of his (dis)ability when he chases after the criminals in an uncharacteristically reckless attempt to rescue her.

It is apparent that the film wants us to feel every visceral, gory, bloody moment of Nathan’s foray into the criminal underworld. Because the audience knows that he cannot feel his horrific injuries, that feeling ends up transferred across as sympathy pains, so to speak — and very effectively, too, going by audience reactions throughout the screening. However, for an everyman character who is repeatedly thrown into situations where he should be out of his depth, Nathan seems remarkably sure of himself in ways that even John Wick would admire.

The early scenes do a decent, if sparse, job of setting up the life of the main protagonist. Nathan lives a fairly ordinary life as an introverted assistant bank manager, with his main socialization being online gaming with his friend Roscoe (Jacob Batalon).

Nathan is empathetic to his clients and cordial, though distant, with his colleagues, and he has a pharmacy’s worth of first aid resources at his office desk. He also has a habit of numbly listening to podcasts that exhort listeners not to allow their disabilities to limit them and, instead, to think of their condition as a superpower.

As a child, Nathan’s horrified parents essentially barricaded him away from the world for his own protection. But even as an adult, he has continued to live a life marked by extreme avoidance. His pencils all have balls of sticky tack wrapped around their pointed tips, tennis balls cover other sharp surfaces, his bookcases are rigged to prevent books from falling, and every jutting table edge and door jamb is effectively child-proofed with soft padding.

Foregrounding this early on creates a good contrast once the action really takes off as we see Nathan shrug off excruciating injuries in his single-minded pursuit of Sherry’s kidnappers.

The role of an everyman thrust into a violent world is not new to Quaid — his breakout role was as mild-mannered Hughie Campbell in the ultra-violent superhero satire The Boys, in which his character is radicalized into becoming a vigilante after his girlfriend is killed by a “good guy” superhero.

But Quaid plays Nathan quite differently from his character on The Boys: Hughie is almost painfully non-confrontational, and it takes some extreme incidents to flip his moral compass over to “antihero”; Nathan himself seems surprised at how immediately he switches from awkward banker with a crush to John Wick on a rampage.

The relationship dynamic between Nathan and Sherry is one thing that works well in this film, but some of the side characters feel a little one-note, like detectives Mincy (Betty Gabriel) and Coltraine (Matt Walsh). But the story also includes a couple of trope-busting surprises.

There is some memorable dialogue, such as when Sherry discovers his condition on their first date and calls him a superhero, to which he responds with, “My superpower is stepping on a nail and not noticing until my shoe fills up with blood. True story.” Or when, in the middle of a fight, Nathan (who is extremely well-versed in first aid, for obvious reasons) makes first aid suggestions to his attacker.

The action is well-choreographed and fast-paced, with some dizzying camera work employed to show Nathan’s perspective. The film moves along at a steady clip (if maybe a little TOO quick of a pace sometimes), and while it works for the most part and makes for a fun watch, this is a film that might have felt richer and more compelling with a couple of key structural story changes.

A major disconnect comes when the film asks us to take this character’s very real medical condition seriously and wince at every gruesome injury he sustains while applying action-movie plot armour to all the other characters. The film sets up the rules of this universe to allow Nathan to do the unbelievable things he does so that the audience understands that his disability lets him act more quickly and decisively than any other human possibly could.

However, other characters, like Simon, the primary antagonist and lead bank robber, appear to endure equally inhuman levels of pain yet simply walk it off unless they are eliminated, zombie-style, through the head.

Another issue is with the narrative conflict, or lack thereof. Despite the literal conflict of the fight scenes, Nathan’s actual journey towards finding Sherry is fairly straightforward with no real dilemmas — even after the big plot twist where, ideally, the script should have given Nathan a beat to consider the implications of what he just learned. The story would have been better had it allowed Nathan a moment of introspection, which would also give the audience a chance to absorb how high the stakes are for him.

Despite all this, the film remains a good viewing experience. It does a good job of hitting all its story beats, with well-choreographed action sequences and snappy dialogue, as well as a believable relationship between Nathan and Sherry, where the latter proves to be the right motivation to kick off the explosive evolution of his character arc after a lifetime of self-repression.

While the disconnect between the genre expectations and the character of Nathan occasionally breaks the suspension of disbelief (the film might have done better to lean even more into action tropes rather than straddling the line between real world and genre expectations), the film’s overall charm gives a lot to appreciate.