“Meet Nathan Caine. He can’t feel pain.” As far as poster taglines go, that is an all-timer: neatly and succinctly boiling down a zany high concept into seven simple words. For yes, Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) has congenital insensitivity to pain, a condition that comes in very handy when he inadvertently finds himself in an action-comedy film. In its outlandish premise tailor-made for wacky genre mishaps, it shares some ingredients with the nutty 2006 Jason Statham flick Crank — even if its execution is not quite as bold. (No falling out of a helicopter and surviving here.)
Novocaine’s Nathan is not dissimilar from Jack Quaid’s most famous role thus far, Hughie in The Boys: a bumbling, nerdy everyman, reluctantly thrust into a tough-guy world. When we meet him, he’s a kind-hearted credit union assistant manager, who mostly spends his spare time playing video games with the gamertag ‘MagicNateBall’. When bank robbers descend on the credit union, they take Nathan’s colleague and romantic interest Shari (Amber Midthunder) hostage — leading Nathan to take matters into his own hands.
Nothing about this is ruinously bad — it all just feels like a race to the middle.
Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen understand that a good action movie must royally beat its hero up six ways to Sunday, and sure enough, Nathan takes some real hits, taking full advantage of his condition. He shrugs off an arrow through the leg, cheerfully removes a bullet from a hole in his arm, and gamely hams it up during a torture scene by pretending to be in pain. It’s a fun idea, and you kind of wish it had been pushed further: Nathan’s cumulative injuries become increasingly grisly, but aren’t really mined comedically. This is the kind of comedy to provoke snickers rather than any belly laughs.
The action, meanwhile, will only provoke the odd approving nod rather than enthusiastic air-punches. Quaid is good value, but while this has a premise that most action stars would dream of, its fight choreography is strictly workmanlike. It’s a real shame that Amber Midthunder, the only one here with genuine action bona fides — her turn in Prey marked the arrival of a new star of the genre — is largely left to be a damsel-in-distress type, even with a nicely unexpected mid-movie wrinkle for her character.
Nothing about this is ruinously bad — it all just feels like a race to the middle; obvious needle drops on the soundtrack (R.E.M.’s ‘Everybody Hurts’, The Darkness’ ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’) speak to a slight lack of imagination. For such a fun, silly premise, given promise by one of the best taglines in recent memory, it’s disappointing that Novocaine only ever manages okay, rather than great. Pass the anaesthetic.
