Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Novocaine’ on VOD, an Ultraviolent Comedy About a Man Who Can’t Feel Pain

It’s certainly apt that Novocaine (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is likely to test your numbness to cinematic violence. This somewhat high-concept action comedy stars Jack Quaid – son of a couple people you might recognize, Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan – as a meek fella who can’t feel pain, and finds himself in a situation where his condition is helpful instead of a detriment. And yes, of course, the situation requires him to take an ungodly amount of brutal punishment, but, as inevitably passes through our minds while the movie unspools, hopefully nothing that’ll cause permanent damage or death, because it’s not like he’s unkillable. I mean, he’s not Rambo or Chuck Norris –  he’s just an average guy, not an action figure in human form, and there’s only so many bullets he can shrug off, y’know?

NOVOCAINE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” plays over the opening credits, but it’s shallow irony – Michael Stipe sure seems to be singing about psychological pain, not stubbing your toe or bumping your head or, more specific to this movie, putting your hand in a bubbling deep fryer. Nate Caine (Quaid) has congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA), a real-life genetic condition that probably doesn’t function quite how it’s represented in this movie, but let’s stop being sticks in the mud and just suspend our disbelief for a while. He’s a quiet, unassuming, lonely guy who’s carefully managed his existence around his condition – tennis balls on sharp corners, timers set so his bladder doesn’t burst, liquid-only meals because he’s afraid he’ll bite down on his tongue and bleed to death (yipes). He works as an assistant manager at a bank, and is a sweet, thoughtful guy who gives a recent widower some wiggle room to cover the mortgage on his struggling business. Then Nate goes home and plays video games with an online buddy he’s never met, Roscoe (Jacob Batalon). His world is small.

But there’s this girl at work who’s the subject of dreamy slo-mo Nate-POV shots, Sherry (Amber Midthunder). Lucky for him, she accidentally bumps him in the breakroom and makes him spill coffee and burn the living crap out of his hand – even the meet-cute in this movie includes a painful injury. She asks him out to lunch and he awkwardly accepts and ends up sharing the woes of his painfully pain-free life with this lovely, smart, very interested young woman. She even manages to get him to eat a bite of her cherry pie, woo woo. They have another date and she goes back to his place and asks if he’s capable of feeling pleasure, a question we all had on the tips of our tongues, although we never get a good answer, perhaps because so many movies nowadays are TERRIFIED of showing people having sex. Point’s made, though – our guy is in luurrve.

How much is he in luurrve, though? We’re about to find out. One day at work three Santa Clauses bust in with Uzis and Glocks, so they can spread some Xmas joy. No, that’s a lie – they wanna rob the joint. They wreak all kinds of havoc, roughing up Nate and grabbing Sherry as a hostage for their escape, blasting away at the cops as they burn rubber outta there. Nate dusts himself off, helps an injured cop, grabs the cop’s dropped pistol and hops in the cop car and tears off after the bad guys goose-chasing all over San Diego for his girl. So there’s your answer as to whether the sex was pleasurable for our dude. And so we get the inevitable: Nate gets into some gnarly fights and suffers stab wounds, bullet wounds, third-degree burns, contusions, bruises, impalements, broken bones and hangnails, and he pretty much shrugs it all off. Oh, forgot to mention that the leader of the robbers is played by Ray Nicholson, so this is all leading to a big fat nepo baby showdown!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Novocaine is an average-guy-loses-it movie crossed with an unsuspecting-hero movie, so it exists somewhere in the gray area between Falling Down and Nobody (or Love Hurts). 

Performance Worth Watching: Quaid continues to build his resume – he popped as a mainstay in the series The Boys, turned up in the two most recent Screams and now has a pair of headlining gigs in Companion and Novocaine, the former showing his capacity for caddishness, and the latter, his capacity for psychological sensitivity AND physical insensitivity. He might have enough It to be a go-to leading man, and may be transcending the condition that helps him as much as it hurts him: congenital superstar parents syndrome.

Memorable Dialogue: I’ll forego the funnier one-liners for a heartfelt utterance via Sherry: “Everybody’s hiding something. We’re all just looking for someone we can show it to.”

Sex and Skin: Just some precoital kissyface.

Our Take: Novocaine is just clever enough to persuade us not to ask too many questions and just go with it. (One night of nookie and the guy’s ready to risk life, limb and the law to save this woman? Okey doke.) And thankfully all the stab wounds, bullet wounds, third-degree burns, contusions, bruises, impalements, broken bones and hangnails don’t occur in brains or livers or other vital areas as Nate squashes his introverted self and summons the self that’s capable of doing horrible, horrible things to horrible, horrible people in the name of luurrve. 

That’s a pretty steep arc, but Quaid and Midthunder cultivate enough chemistry in early scenes to put it in the ballpark of near-plausible character motivation. All right, it’s not plausible at all, but if Nate doesn’t follow through on Sherry’s declaration – “You’re like a superhero!” she coos before they have sex, which is exactly the kind of thing you say to a guy you want to have sex with – then we don’t have much of a movie here. Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (Significant Other) stage some slick action sequences and maintain a snappy pace, while screenwriter Lars Jacobson sprinkles the mayhem with enough crunchy one-liners to keep us chuckling. 

It’s worth noting that this movie, as you may expect, ramps up the violence for a particularly grisly conclusion that made me think of not just RoboCop, but RoboCop: The Director’s Cut. There were also moments where I wondered if the primary bad guy also doesn’t feel pain, considering how much punishment he endures. You’ve been warned, and that warning includes a heads-up that the film’s rom-com charms and average-guy-loses-his-god-damn-shit gimmickry wear off a bit as the violence escalates and the tone shifts from sweet to silly to darkly comic. But by then, we’re committed to seeing it through, if only to see how much Novocaine tests the limits of Movie CIPA before we lose our lunches.

Our Call: Novocaine is genial enough in its extreme violence to endear audiences with the capacity to endure it. It goes from fun to sicko fun. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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