Novocaine

dirs.: Dan Berk & Robert Olsen

2025

What a premise! Guy who doesn’t feel pain getting caught up in crime shenanigans, somehow wins the day but is tortured, burned, shot, stabbed, mutilated and humiliated for our entertainment for an hour and fifty long, long minutes.

It’s a comedy, but in some ways it’s body horror, and really it’s not that different from other crime / action related flicks where the guy endures heaps of bodily abuse in order to get revenge / get the bad guys / avenge his dog, except instead of being brutalised but stoically persisting, like a John Wick / any Statham movie, the completely untrained main guy cops the abuse, doesn’t feel anything, but keeps going anyway.

Of course the premise is bullshit. A person with what Nathan Caine – He Feels No Pain! is most likely to succumb to is hyperthermia, or a terrible infection, or any number of undetected injuries. They don’t usually become reluctant action heroes. The condition doesn’t somehow grant immunity from severing muscle tissue, tendons or what should result in catastrophic blood loss.

But let’s not let logic slow us down now – we’re meant to be having fun!

At least, that is if your definition of fun is watching bits of some guy sheer off of his body like you’re watching a Troma film like Toxic Avenger or Street Trash from yesteryear.

I do have to admit that I’m a pretty squeamish person so that this kind of hook for a flick is no hook for me to hang anything from. I hate watching scenes of people gleefully, sadistically tormenting someone even if it is cartoonish. And the difference here is conceptual, rather than anything else. There’s a scene where one of the bad guys is doing what he thinks would cause maximum pain for the lead, by ripping his fingernails out with pliers, and while Nathan only pretends that it’s painful, as opposed to any actor in an equivalent scene pretending that it’s agony for real, doesn’t it amount to the same thing?

Jack Quaid, who is Mr Everywhere at the moment, plays this role like I assume he is going to play every role he ever does in any film or show ever: geeky, awkward, friendly ‘nice’ guy who’s just trying to do the right thing by everyone. Does he have an awkward charm to him? I dunno, but he must be doing something right to be getting hired continually.

Here he plays an assistant bank manager at a San Diego bank who lives a somewhat constrained life because he grew up in a somewhat fearful bubble of being overprotected (with good reason) by his parents because of his condition. He subsists on a liquid diet to avoid inadvertently chewing his tongue off, which he wouldn’t feel. He drinks iced coffee because if he drank hot coffee he wouldn’t be able to tell if his mouth is burning from the drink.

A new hire at the bank, being Sherry (Amber Midthunder) shows interest in him, and because she’s beautiful, and the first person to show any interest in him, he of course loses his simple mind when they spend a fun day and evening together.

Wouldn’t you know it, the very next day, when he’s so grateful and working up the courage to say thank you to her for deigning to have sex with him without sounding pathetic (there is no way to do that, sad to say), bank robbers rob the bank where they both work. What are the odds?

When they threaten Sherry, Nathan coughs up the code to the vault, which you would hope would be the end of the problem, but the jerks take the money and take Sherry hostage.

Nathan must save Sherry at any cost to himself, or anyone else, no matter how many fingers he loses.

What follows is a very slow rampage across San Diego as Nathan, who knows nothing about anything, really, except first aid, bumbles his way towards Sherry. So when he fights one of the robbers in a Chinese restaurant kitchen, he’s continuously apologising and saying “hey, man, I just want to find Sherry” as the other guy does everything in his powers to kill Nathan. It’s awkward and makes Nathan look, at best naïve, and at worst, Simple Jack levels of dumb.

Regardless of the opportunities that this premise offers the screenwriters, most of it really comes down to creating situations that ‘normal’ people would be too terrified to put themselves in, like a gun falling into a deep fryer for minutes at a time, that no sane person would reach their hand into because of the awful third degree burns that would result, but Nathan has no fear doing it because… I can’t really tell if its clever or lazy, because until the very previous day they showed Nathan being entirely risk averse because of all the terrible experiences he’s had accidentally hurting himself in the past. Now, because he lost his virginity, he’s like “fuck it, who needs skin anyway?” because he must save the “girl” at any cost.

It really plays out like a slightly less scuzzy and slightly less stoopid update of the Crank movies that Jason Statham thinks he’s too good for these days. They too had a champ rampaging across a city whilst terrible things were done to him or by him, in order to survive, save the girl, get his heart back, not die, whatever. They were also filmed in a style befitting the crazy meth-addled premise. Those flicks moved. They didn’t fuck around. This flick drags, drags on.

This flick apes that kind of sensibility, but doesn’t have the same level of commitment, or the same sick sense of humour. This flick has a different sick sense of humour, and thinks it’s amusing to us in the audience if Nathan slowly wanders around in a house full of booby traps getting maces lodged in his back and crossbow bolts in his legs going “Hmm, a crossbow bolt through the knee, I should have guessed that would happen” in a neutral voice as if someone is passively debating whether to have Earl Grey or Lady Grey tea to drink, depending on their mood and the vibes at the time.

I’m no doctor, because, well, for a million reasons, including “ew, no, gross”, but the main problem with getting a crossbow bolt through one thigh, and then, due to circumstances, having to ram it through the other thigh as well (for a laugh), wouldn’t just be whether it was painful or not. Severing all those muscles and the femoral arteries, now they’d give you something to cry about, but that is me being churlish, and ungrateful. That is me not being in synch with the vibe of this movie, which is meant to be squeamish fun.

It’s just, nah, not for me. The film is what it is. I actually “like” Jack Quaid fine, and I think the world of Amber Midthunder, mostly because she was so fantastic in that retro de-make Predator prequel from a couple of years ago called Prey. This was too long, and a slog for me, though I probably would have squirmed just as much but probably laughed more had I seen it in a packed Friday night cinema screening with a crowd.

It’s just that, whether it’s a comedy or not, whenever they got to torturing Nathan, or he tortures himself or whatever, it would be both sickening but also silly, so it’s not like I could take any of those scenes of extremity that seriously.

Plus there needs to be a limit on the amount of nepo babies that can be in a flick? The lead is the progeny of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, but one of the (awful) bad guys, called Simon, is played by Ray Nicholson, son of Jack Nicholson. Yes, that Jack Nicholson. And he has some of the same snarl, playing an absolute psychopath here, but he doesn’t have the presence or charisma, or at least if he has a fraction of his dad’s talent I haven’t seen evidence of it yet.

That’s probably a bit harsh, a bit unfair. Maybe the flick should only have had nepo babies, like maybe Scott Eastwood, Ray Nicholson, John David Washington, Colin Hanks, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Maya Hawke, Lily-Rose Depp, Bryce Dallas Howard and Michael Gandolfini in a flick directed by Sofia Coppola. All of them torturing other nepo babies, like the Kardashians and the Jenners, maybe for the good of all human kind.

But I can only review what I actually see, not the bad craziness that I can imagine *shudder*. As it stands, I’ll never watch this flick again, that’s for sure, and I also have no doubt they’re going to make a sequel, which, I’ll be honest, unless they do my nepo baby idea, I will definitely not be watching. Oh no dear gods no.

It’s amusing enough, but eww, no, gross.

6 times I’m glad I have a preternaturally strong stomach out of 10

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“Don't let yourself go
'Because everybody cries
Everybody hurts sometimes” - Novocaine