Novocaine Movie Review: Mind-Numbing Fun

Novocaine is mind-numbing fun, with a winningly committed lead turn from Jack Quaid, effective action, and a cute but simple story.

Rather, Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid, The Boys, Companion), is a huge dork and a loner, a kind-hearted dweeb who works as an assistant manager at a bank by day, and plays MMORPG’s by night. He likes it this way because he has a genetic neurological condition which allows him to never feel pain. As such, he’s removed even the slightest chance to put himself in danger, from adding tennis balls to the corners of his furniture, to allowing for extra space between cars while driving, to sticking exclusively to eating only liquids, for fear of accidentally biting his tongue off. To be fair, this is a real condition which real people deal with, but Novocaine takes a kind of elementary-brain approach, by coming up with the most deranged situations for Nathan to find himself in and utilize his condition to his advantage.

His opportunities are thrust upon him when his co-worker and crush Sherry (Amber Midthunder, Prey) is kidnapped after a robbery at their branch. To get her back, Nathan will have to subject himself to all manner of physical torture by chasing down the bad guys and uncovering their scheme. One of Novocaine’s small pleasures is in its smaller stakes; Jacobson does not make the film into yet another John Wick clone, where Nathan has to battle his way through a massive criminal underworld and kill all manner of faceless henchmen. Instead, it’s a simple bank robbery executed by a handful of thinly-drawn bad guys with only perfunctory motivations.

But where the film fails in its three-dimensional storytelling, it breaks even thanks to Jack Quaid’s go-for-broke enthusiasm. It’s a shame that Quaid and Midthunder spend so much of the film apart because they share undeniable chemistry in their early scenes together. Though I’d hate for Novocaine to stretch itself too thin, I wouldn’t have minded spending more time with them together, to further establish their bond once they’re torn apart. The bulk of the film, once the inciting incident occurs, trades off between action scenes of Nathan fighting against the bank robbers and scenes of raw, two-dimensional exposition.

Berk and Olsen’s first impulses are to throw everything they can at Quaid simply to see what they can get away with. The film fully owns its R rating by almost becoming a kind of body horror vehicle in its action sequences. One scene literally feels designed as a deranged Home Alone riff, finding all manner of ways for Nathan to be maimed, cut up, and otherwise “injured”. While there are laughs to be found in these moments, it’s almost too reliant on the premise, rather than solidly written jokes or premises. By the time Novocaine ends, it’s almost too easy to realize you’ve become comfortably numb to questioning basic things, like why a character is doing something, or how they got to this point. But with so few big studio, theatrically released comedies being made these days, even a flawed result is better than none at all.

Novocaine will be released in US theatres on March 14, 2025 and in UK cinemas on March 28.