One of the most striking moments that I can recall seeing in an action movie is the one in The Fugitive (1993) where a gun is fired too close to the ear of one of the US Marshalls pursuing our hero and he winds up losing much of his hearing as a result. In the grand scheme of things, this was a brief moment but it was a rare acknowledgement of the vulnerabilities of the human body and how they are routinely ignored in the service of action cinema, where such things suffer incredible trauma and abuse that the characters, even the most seemingly unassuming of them, somehow manage to shake off with virtually no side effects. In the best films of this type, it is not something that one dwells upon too much because we look at it as just another example of the suspension of disbelief that we implicitly agree to when when we buy our tickets and take our seats. Novocaine is a film that tries, at least in theory, to explore and exploit that covenant through what is essentially a super violent live-action cartoon but which ultimately turns out to be as banal as it is bloody and believe me, it is very bloody.
Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) is a seemingly ordinary and unassuming young man with one particular quirkâa genetic disorder that have left him without the ability to feel pain. Because of this, he leads an extreme risk-averse life in which his shower has a block on the knob to keep it from getting too hot, he consumes an all-liquid diet to avoid the possibility of biting off his tongue and spends his time away from his bank job holed up in his apartment playing video games online. One day, however, he is lured away from his safety-first rut by Sherry (Amber Midthunder), a co-worker on whom he has a barely-disguised crush, who invites him out for pie and to her art show. The two bond over their shared traumatic pasts, Sherry helps Nathan get revenge on one of his childhood bullies and as the evening comes to an end, she inevitably asks him if his inability to feel pain means that he is unable to feel pleasure and you can guess where things go from there.
Alas, Nathanâs newfound bliss ends abruptly the next day at work when the bank is stormed by a trio of thieves dressed as Santa Claus who proceed to murder the bank manager and steal hundreds of thousands of dollars before making their getaway, taking Sherry with them as a hostage. In an act of pure foolhardiness, Nathan decides to give chase and rescue Sherry himself, convinced that the cops will assume he was in on it and that she will be dead before he can convince them otherwise. This leads to an endless array of scenes in which Nathan tries to track down the thieves, led by Simon (Ray Nicholson), and the ways that his condition allows him to fight back despite theoretically being overmatchedâat one point, he evens the odds in a fistfight by grinding his bare knuckles into bits of glass so that he can impose maximum damage on his opponent. Along the way, he is pursued by a couple of weary cops (Betty Gabriel and Matt Walsh) and aided by Roscoe (Jacob Batalon), who certainly goes all out for someone he has never actually met before in the flesh.
Novocaine is essentially a one-joke film, the joke being the sight of Nathan suffering all forms of bodily injury, all depicted in lovingly gruesome detail, and essentially shrugging all of it off as he moves to the next bit of carnage. The problem is that this one joke is not particularly uniqueâagain, the conceit of people undergoing maximum physical damage with little discernible effect is one of the building blocks of contemporary action cinemaâand the endless repetitions, although certainly gory enough, are never crazy or inventive enough to overcome the monotony. The screenplay by Lars Jacobson is devoid of any innovationâeven the injuries are formulaicâand the attempts to throw the occasional twist into the proceedings prove to be remarkably predictable. The action beats staged by co-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen are staged with the kind of fast-paced but largely soulless energy of too many recent action filmsâthe film never demonstrates even a trace of anything resembling the kind of distinctive personality that someone like Sam Raimi or Luc Besson might have brought to the premise.
Finding themselves inside what is essentially a live-action version of an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon, the actors have little to do except to either punch, shoot or stab each other or react to being punched, shot or stabbed. Quaid and Nicholson, as the hero and key antagonist, go through their paces without contributing much more than the occasional suggestion of their famous parents, Batalon pretty much plays the same best pal role that he essayed in the recent series of Spider-Man films and old pros like Gabriel and Walsh have so little to do with the proceedings that when they do occasionally pop up, they feel like afterthoughts. However, the filmâs most jaw-dropping flaw and failure is the way that it brings in Amber Midthunder, the striking actress who knocked out viewers with her magnetic presence in the Predator prequel Prey, arguably the high point of the entire franchise, and then gives her nothing to do. She is still the best thing here and to whatever extent the oddball rom-com-like opening section works, it is due almost entirely to her. However, once the action starts, she ends up getting sidelined and while she does get to kick a little ass towards the end, to bring someone with her obvious charm, charisma and action bonafides and then sideline her in a warehouse for most of the running time seems like a bizarre misuse of core assets.
As longtime readers should know by now, I do not have a problem with screen violence being presented in a deliberately over-the-top manner for comedic effect. Done properly, the results can be both hilarious and thrilling but too accomplish that, one needs to bring something more to the material than just gallons of fake blood in order to make it more than just a bloodbath. That doesnât happen in Novocaine and the result is a film that isnât so much a knock-down drag-out as it is just a drag. While the film may contain a hero who feels no pain from start to finish, the same cannot be said for anyone watching it.