Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) can’t feel pain, but audiences will while watching Novocaine, a misfire that never strikes the right balance between comedy and carnage.
The story of a man with a rare genetic condition that makes him impervious to suffering who finds himself thrust into rescue-mission mode when his beloved is kidnapped, Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s feature operates in a similar vein to Bob Odenkirk’s Nobody and Ke Huy Quan’s recent Love Hurts. That is to say that the film strives for laughs and thrills by putting an everyman through the brutal ringer. Yet in trying to have it both ways, it succeeds in neither, in the process stranding its charming leading man in a saga that needed to be either goofier or more gruesome.
There’s plenty of violence in Novocaine, which hits theaters Mar. 14, most of it inflicted upon Nathan, whose apartment and office at the San Diego bank where he’s assistant manager are safety-proofed with tennis balls on sharp edges, and who only drinks liquids because, should he chew food, he might inadvertently bite off his tongue.
Although Nathan says that doctors assumed he wouldn’t survive past his early twenties, he’s doing just fine at age 30, albeit in a reclusive sort of way; outside of work, he spends most of his time at home playing video games with his sole (online) friend Roscoe (Jacob Batalon). All that changes as the holidays near, courtesy of coworker Sherry (Amber Midthunder), who after accidentally burning Nathan with hot coffee attempts to make it up to him by asking him out to lunch.
At a diner, Sherry hears about Nathan’s unique circumstances and cajoles him into trying his first bite of cherry pie—a revelatory experience that endears him to her. He thus accepts her invite to her local art show, and later at a bar, she stands up to a middle school bully who’s interested in picking on Nathan, whose childhood nickname was “Novocaine.” Nathan hates that moniker but Sherry thinks it’s a “badass” superhero handle, and if that weren’t enough to cause him to fall head over heels, a night of sex does the trick. Sheltered and lonely for so long, Nathan is enlivened by love.
Novocaine’s early meet-cute passages are suitably sweet, even if Lars Jacobson’s script never quite explicates Nathan’s malady; it’s clear that he’s invulnerable to discomfort, but the degree to which he feels any sensation is left vague, thereby rendering the film’s conceit imprecise. Nonetheless, things quickly kick into high gear when, the next morning, a trio of bank robbers dressed in Santa outfits storm the bank.
The branch manager refuses to provide the code to the vault and, for his recalcitrance, is shot dead by the criminals’ leader Simon (Ray Nicholson). To get Nathan to comply, he threatens Sherry, who’s subsequently taken hostage during their cop-slaying getaway. Newly empowered by amour, Nathan refuses to take this lying down. Throwing caution to the wind, he takes an injured police officer’s gun, steals his patrol car, and gives chase.
As demonstrated by his performance on The Boys, Quaid is good at being a flustered and frazzled average Joe, making him well-suited for Nathan, whose first opportunity for valor comes in a restaurant kitchen where he squares off against thief Ben (Evan Hengst).
This skirmish is gnarly, with Nathan taking, and shrugging off, a thorough beating thanks to his corporeal numbness. Berk and Olsen have fun with Nathan’s ability to take a licking and keep on ticking, which culminates with him procuring a gun from a deep fat frier just in time to off his adversary. Still, this initial set piece is grisly without being truly shocking, and ridiculous without eliciting actual laughs—a state of affairs that plagues every one of Nathan’s ensuing battles.
Novocaine’s premise begs for a truly over-the-top approach à la Crank, a predecessor it channels when Nathan gives himself an extra jolt of energy via an EpiPen injection and employs a defibrillator for beat-em-up purposes. The directors, unfortunately, don’t infuse their material with a genuinely extreme spirit.
For all its goriness, the film pulls its punches, unwilling to truly go the gonzo distance. At the same time, despite instances in which Nathan fights baddies with the sharp objects protruding from his hands and legs, or shards of glass he’s stuck in his fists, it fails to invent situations that take full, amusing advantage of the protagonist’s novel disorder. Whereas Nathan should be a Looney Tunes-style pin cushion, and his tale should be a wild and winding odyssey of ever-escalating mirthful mayhem, everything instead comes across as grim and flat.
(Warning: Some spoilers ahead.)
As Nathan endeavors to be a gallant knight similar to the one whose story he’s self-tattooed on his body (a cutesy detail that doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny), Novocaine reveals that Sherry is no damsel in distress; she’s in on the heist with Simon, who’s her brother.
This complicates Nathan’s quest, but it does so in the dullest way imaginable, since unsurprisingly, she’s not on board with her brother’s psychotic behavior and really does care for Nathan. So ferocious in Prey, Midthunder makes little impression here, and that’s also true of Smile 2’s Nicholson. Simon’s high-wire jokiness is off-key, and his wanton murderousness is too illogical to be believable. Like Nathan, he feels awkwardly caught between realism and cartoonishness.
Throughout, Nathan is pursued by a sympathetic detective (Betty Gabriel) and her wisecracking partner (Matt Walsh), who serve no purpose except to be late plot devices. More troublesome, however, is Novocaine’s limited scope. There are merely a few stops along Nathan’s path to Sherry and Simon, and they’re mostly ho-hum, including visits to a tattoo parlor whose owner is a burly Nazi, and a house that’s wired with deadly boobytraps that don’t hurt so much as bloodily inconvenience the hero. Even a torture session in which Nathan feigns agony goes nowhere, devoid of any creative torment.
Playing an ordinary guy with an extraordinary affliction, Quaid does his best to make Nathan at once aww-shucks endearing and crazily clownish. Berk and Olsen, alas, can’t reconcile their competing interests, the result being a film that’s light on both pain and pleasure.
