He was nicknamed Novocaine by school bullies, because of a rare genetic condition that made him impervious to pain. At age 30, Nate works at a bank and lives a solitary life, playing video games with an unseen online buddy. He cannot eat solid food, because he might bite his tongue off and not realise it.
The action film, directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (hardly the kind of film that needed two heads!), stars Jack Quaid as Nate; who falls for fellow bank worker Sherry (Amber Midthunder), after just one date, because she is not fazed by his condition. Then, around Christmas, three men dressed as Santa Claus rob the bank and take Sherry hostage. Nate takes off in pursuit to save Sherry, giving the cops the impression that he was in on the heist.
What follows is Home Alone style comic book style carnage in which the mousy bank guy takes on armed robbers. He gets shot at, burned, stabbed, hung upside down, but keeps rolling on; his opponents end up bruised, bloody or dead. Nate, powered by love and painlessness, carries on to find the robbers’ hideout and rescue Sherry, who didn’t really need help, but that has never stopped a true knight. Even an unlikely one like Nate.
The writer (Lars Jacobson) and director set up one action set piece after another—one in a kitchen, using skillets, pans, knives and hot stew to fell one villain, leaving the cops baffled. In a tattoo parlour, Nate is able to subdue a big, muscular man, by dipping his bleeding hands in glass shards and then hitting him. In the booby-trapped home of one of the robbers, he gets the worse of the fight with all the hidden weapons, but a man in love is invincible. Unlike other action heroes this one takes more punches than he doles out, which is what gives the film its heart and a small degree of humour amidst the needless gore – close ups of nails being pulled out with pliers, and men bleeding copiously. Nate pulls out a bullet from his arm with pliers and closes the wound with superglue, while a section of the audience must be grossed out.
In a grisly but funny scene, Nate pretends to scream with pain as one of the villains tortures him, waiting for his video game buddy Roscoe (Jacob Batalon) to arrive and help. Novocaine is a one-idea film made watchable by its pace and Jack Quaid’s uninhibited performance.
Interestingly, Jack Quaid is the son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan; one of the robbers is Ray Nicholson, son of Jack Nicholson and Rebecca Broussard– so there’s some nepotism happening in Hollywood too.
Novocaine
Directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen
Cast: Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Betty Gabriel, Matt Walsh and others
On Amazon Prime Video
