Jack Quaid Is Perfect for the Comic Slaughterfest of Novocaine

Novocaine could have been written by a 12-year-old, and I’m not sure I mean that pejoratively. It’s a riff on superhero stories, but it’s been thought up with a whiff of dopey plausibility: The film’s protagonist, Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid), suffers from something called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis (CIPA), which is a real condition that probably doesn’t work quite as conveniently as it does here. Nate not only can’t feel pain, he also doesn’t get all that hurt. One assumes that a real person with CIPA wouldn’t walk away so easily from an unfortunate encounter with a giant, flanged, and spiked steel ball, but, well, then we wouldn’t have a movie. And if we did, it wouldn’t be nearly as fun as Novocaine.

Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen take this dumb-clever, fake-movie-science idea and run with it as hard and as fast as they can in one straight direction, using Nate’s condition as an excuse for pure, unchecked mayhem. They do find some time for the requisite bit of character shading, however. Ever since being diagnosed with CIPA as a child, Nate has lived a heavily managed and risk-free life. He has tennis balls stuck to every treacherously sharp corner in his apartment. He can’t eat solid food because he might bite his tongue off. He doesn’t drink anything hot because he wouldn’t know if he was burning himself. He sets an alarm to ring every three hours so his bladder doesn’t explode, because he won’t feel the pressure that tells him he needs to pee.

Like all good romantics, however, Nate finds himself starting to take risks when Sherry (Amber Midthunder), the hip and gorgeous young employee at the bank where he works as an assistant manager, takes a shine to him. Unlike Nate, who had a lovingly sheltered upbringing, the rebellious Sherry was brought up in foster homes and ran away from her adopted family at the age of 18. These two make a good movie match: She’s been cutting herself since childhood to get away from the world, while he’s been tattooing himself as a way of imagining a new life because he can’t go out into the world.

One day, Sherry is kidnapped by a bunch of armed crooks who come charging into the bank dressed as Santas. These aren’t just your average masked goons. Led by a snarling sociopath named Simon (Ray Nicholson, doing dad Jack proud with his demonic smile), they shoot the manager, beat Nate to a pulp, and machine-gun the cops Heat-style. These guys will kill anything and everything, it seems. Against all his better judgment (and narrative logic), a bloodied Nate goes off to hunt them down and save Sherry.

With his affable lankiness and slightly aristocratic reserve, Quaid is well cast, and he makes a nice contrast with the musclebound psychos he keeps having to confront. We buy him as a guy who is constitutionally (and purposefully) out of touch with the world around him, and we also buy his slightly quizzical responses to the assorted indignities visited upon his body. The insincere little yelps he gives when he’s trying to hide his condition while being tortured manage to be genuinely funny thanks to Quaid’s almost alien delivery. He makes Nate not just a guy who doesn’t feel pain but also a guy who just plain doesn’t understand pain.

Nihilistic action comedies such as Novocaine are built on juxtaposing irreverent humor with cathartic carnage, which can sometimes feel off-putting and contrived. Here, that combination is less jarring because the slaughter flows organically from the premise: Because Nate doesn’t respond much to pain, he gets beaten and maimed even harder. Plus, he can do gnarly stuff like use one of his own protruding wrist bones to stab a dude in the neck, or pound broken shards of glass into his fists and then repeatedly punch a swastika-tattooed villain in the eyes. (By the way, enjoy Novocaine while you can, before the Trump White House bans it.)

The nonstop cadence of manic violence and gore does lose some of its visceral charge after a while, mainly because it’s hard to keep going in such a cartoonish direction without experiencing some exhaustion. These kinds of films are already built on minimizing pain, not just for our hero but for all the characters. To wit: There’s an actual Looney Tunes movie also out this week, but for some reason Novocaine is the one where some poor bastard gets flattened by a giant anvil that drops from a hole in the ceiling. Because what happens to Nate keeps escalating, what happens to everyone else keeps escalating as well. His condition makes a good launching pad for his quest, but by the end of the picture, we feel like we’re watching something a lot more typical — just another action hero who seems impossible to kill.