Novocaine arrives with one bag of good news, and one bag that should’ve packed a little lighter on the ultra-violence.
I write this with a full understanding that other people may not agree. They’ll enjoy both bags, especially since the movie’s admiring close-ups of fingernail torture and the like, especially in a story of a man whose genetic order renders him insensitive to pain, goes for the laugh as often as not.
But it hurts seeing Novocaine squander a promising setup, with an unusually effective depiction of a romance in its first-date stage. The movie’s star, Jack Quaid, best known for The Boys, acquits himself with a breezy, Jack Lemmony air here, if Jack Lemmon found himself in a prequel to The Equalizer sometime around 1957.
CIPT, as we learn from Novocaine’s somewhat fanciful idea of the particulars, has the enormous downside of messing with his awareness if he happens to injure himself and not see or feel the effects in time to prevent serious trouble. He’s hardly immortal.
So Nathan lays low out of habit, dating little and gaming much. (Jacob Batalon gets an enjoyable turn as Nate’s online fellow gamer.)
At the San Diego credit union where Nate works as junior manager, coworker Sherry, played by the deservedly busy actress Amber Midthunder, seems at least half as sweet on him as Nate feels about her.
This may be grade inflation, since nobody seems to write first-date sequences with anything like a human pulse anymore, but Novocaine does a deft job with their budding attraction.
It takes its time, establishes a few things and finds ways to make Nate and Sherry likable — and somehow, directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen and screenwriter Lars Jacobson avoid the cliche of a wordless montage, backed by song. Bold risk! Actual dialogue, delivered by actual actors acting!
Anyone who’s seen the trailer knows that Novocaine is really an action movie, waiting for its cue to start slicing and walloping.
When the credit union is robbed in broad daylight by three generic killers, boom, it’s multiple bullet-fiddled police officers dead on the street. Sherry becomes a hostage, whisked away at gunpoint by the killers.
I’ll lay off any further plot discussion other than to say Novocaine has a nicely finessed twist around the midpoint, and thereafter a pretty simple line of attack. Nate leaps into action-hero mode, and the film’s mayhem blowouts include a multi-weapon melee in a restaurant kitchen, leaving our gangly hero horribly burned but quite chipper about it, since his adversary is less fortunate.
The cardboard psychos are a drag, and while some nicely staged “kills” (odious noun, there) pop up, gushing blood, in the climactic booby-trapped house showdown, I kind of hate that stuff.
By the end of Novocaine, it’s as if the filmmakers – who have talent, and who are now off and running in a commercial sense — forgot how their movie started: with Quaid and Midthunder getting the material and the screen time needed to hook an audience’s interest, before the jocular sadism commenced in earnest. – Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service
Summary:
No pain, no gain.
