2025 so far seems to be the year of the loved-up action movie. Not a few months prior, we watched Ke Huy Quan perform all manner of lethal limbed kill moves in order to win the heart of Ariana DeBose in Love Hurts and now we get Jack Quaid absorbing near Terminator-levels of punishment in order to get closer to Amber Midthunder in Novocaine. However, while the former film kind of treated it’s violent world with rose-tinted glasses to middling effect, directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen decide to take a different route with their action opus.
What if you still kept that wide-eyed optimism that most love stories need to thrive, but you didn’t skimp on the horrific injury detail that occurs when you fight a string a bad guys to save the woman you love? What if you can have your cake and eat it by having your hero be a super nice guy but you need him to bring some serious pain to those who deserve it? Simple. You just remove the pain. Allow me to explain:
Nathan Caine is what you’d call the very definition of a mild-mannered introvert. He hold the role of Assistant Bank Manager at his job, he rarely goes out socialising and his idea of a thrilling evening is playing video games online with his best friend, Roscoe – however, there’s far more to his unadventurous life than simply being shy. You see, Nate has a rather curious condition called congenital insensitivity to pain with anhydrous which basically means if he cuts, burns, breaks or hurts himself in general, he won’t feel a thing which has led to understandably unadventurous life thus far.
However, while Nate can’t feel anything physically, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel anything deep in those all-important emotions and as a result he’s developed quite the hefty crush on rookie bank teller Sherry Margrave, so you can imagine his surprise when she asks him out one evening.
Agreeing, despite the risk he may be putting himself in, the two bond and spend the night together and the next day Nate goes to work virtually walking on air. However, a massive black cloud is about to settle over their budding romance when a trio of bank robbers dressed as Santa Claus enter the bank and shoot the place up with machine guns. Collecting a hefty payday and taking Sherry as a hostage, the thieves make their escape, shooting a couple of cops along the way, but unwilling to let the love of his life be taken away from him just as they’ve found each other, Nate nervously takes matters into his own, shaking hands as he grabs a cop’s gun, steals a police cruiser and gives chase in order to save the day.
However, despite the fact that not feeling pain gives him a slight advantage with engaging in brawls involving all manner of sharp implements, that doesn’t mean it makes him a better fighter, so can Nate manage to weather a massive amount of damage and utilitie his condition to the fullest to save the day?
There’s been a long history of action heroes who seem to shrug of all and any injury they sustained, seemingly because they used to be gargantuan man-beasts with biceps bigger than your head, but Novocaine attempts to flip that trope on its head by making it’s pain impervious hero just an extremely affable Jack Quaid in a suit. Thus the aim of Novocaine’s splattery game is to have us alternating between busting a gut laughing while similarly recoiling at all the brutal punishment our cheerful, upbeat lead has to wade through in order to rescue his own, personal damsel and while such a concept could fall into cartoonishness in less capable hands, the duo of Berk and Olsen have obviously given great thought about how best to brutalise Quaid in the most effective (and humorous) way possible. The result is most likely one of the best action comedies we’ll get this year as Novocaine goes all out to realise some of the most excruciatingly agonising slapstick you’re ever likely to see outside an Evil Dead movie and the more extreme the punishment is, the funnier it gets. Graduating early from shrugging off rabbit punches to the ribs and blunt force trauma to the nose, the movie soon delights in going all out to make Nate’s rapidly growing collection of wounds get ever more extreme and horrific. If you squirm with uneasiness at the sight of Quaid retrieving a discarded gun from a bubbling deep fat fryer, then you might be in for a bumpy ride as the movie soon escalates to far more gruesome setpieces.
And what set pieces they are. In fact, an entire section seeing Nate try to negotiate a booby trapped house by accidently falling prey to every trip wire and hidden crossbow stashed in the place is a cracker and things get even better when he’s subsequently tortured and has to unconvincingly fake agony to appease his tormentor. However, while vicious action and plentiful gore are all very well and good, none of it would be effective as it is if not for two things: the fact that the romance angle has time to build adequately enough for you to give a shit; and Jack Quaid’s ludicrously likeable performance as he manages to keep his cheerful demeanor despite all the impalements and flesh wounds he manages to rack up at a hilarious rate. There’s something rather Charlie Chaplin about the perpetually beaming Quaid suddenly discovering that he has an arrow sticking out of him or casually opening up a bullet wound with a Stanley knife in order to get the lead out and the actor sells all of it magnificently. Elsewhere, Amber Midthunder manages to bring enough interesting twists to a character who, in a lesser film, could have been reduced to a mere damsel in distress and the villains are suitably wild-eyed and crazy enough to convince as genuine threats even if three seems to a strangely low number of villains for an action flick. However, it’s quality versus quantity that rules here and even though Novocaine is objectively ridiculous, the fact that the film recognises to keep things remotely grounded despite having a moment where our hero pounds his fists into broken glass to give his punches an extra sting. I mean, sepsis, nerve damage and massive blood loss don’t seem to be much of an issue here, but then if I didn’t complain about stuff like this when I first watched Kick-Ass, why the Hell would I complain about it here? Also, the movie features quite possibly one of the most impossible badass kill moves I’ve seen in quite a while and if you find yourself worrying that you’re laughing like a drain at all this crazed bloodshed, I can assure you that such a innovative use for a compound fracture is legitimately genius.
Genuinely sweet, hilariously violent and well paced, with a few genuine surprises here and there, Novocaine does anything but dulls the senses and while I would add that Jacob Batalon’s Ned Leeds-esque buddy character and Matt Walsh’s bitter detective are rather surplus to requirements, this is one action/comedy that isn’t a pain to sit though.
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