Posted in: Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Paramount Pictures, Review | Tagged: Novocaine
Novocaine doesn’t reinvent a single wheel, but it’s very honest about what it is, which means you know whether or not you’ll be into it.
Article Summary
- Novocaine embraces its cringe comedy roots, with Wile E. Coyote-style violence played for laughs.
- Jack Quaid shines as Nathan, a man with CIPA, using his condition comically yet sympathetically.
- The film plays it safe in narrative with a lack of compelling side characters, focusing on core leads.
- Action sequences blend humor and gore as Nathan’s condition leads to unique, fearless combat moments.
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Novocaine is a film that’s honest about what it is. It’s a “cringe comedy” where you wince every time another Wile E. Coyote-style violent act happens. It doesn’t quite run out of steam but is a film that would be better with a tight 90-minute edit.
Directors: Dan Berk and Robert Olsen
Summary: When the girl of his dreams is kidnapped, a man incapable of feeling physical pain turns his rare condition into an unexpected advantage in the fight to rescue her.
Novocaine Is Here To Make You Wince While Laughing
In horror movies, there is an entire genre that is usually referred to as “torture porn.” The Hostel movies and the SAW films were both examples of movies where one of the intentions is to make you wildly uncomfortable while waiting for people to get brutally mutilated. You wince, you cringe, and if you’re particularly empathetic, you might even feel sick just from watching someone else getting hurt. Then there is the comedy version of this genre where more and more brutal things keep happening to the characters, but it’s played for laughs instead of horror, and the juxtaposition of the gore on screen compared to the irreverent tone is where the humor lies. Novocaine is one of those movies as we follow a main character with a very real disease, CIPA, where he can’t feel pain.
Since the movie was first announced, it was unclear just how in-depth the film would go with the smaller aspects of Nathan’s (Jack Quaid) life. The inability to not feel pain has a lot of downsides, such as the inability to feel temperature, and we see the little ways Nathan has adopted. He has a stopper in the shower so the water can only get so hot, and when he gets coffee at work, he pours it into a cup full of ice. He also explains that he doesn’t eat solid food out of fear of biting his own tongue in half and has to set an alarm to go to the bathroom, or his bladder would rupture. Almost none of that is particularly funny, but it does make Nathan feel more like a person, so by the time things start to go buckwild, he goes on a mission to rescue Sherry (Amber Midthunder), the first girl he has connected with.
From there, Novocaine abandons any sense of nuance regarding Nathan’s condition and just escalates more and more as he tries to track Sherry down. Quaid makes Nathan feel like a genuine person who is just trying to do the right thing, while Midthunder needs to be in every single movie for the rest of her life because she’s fantastic. She’s a movie star; the rest of the industry just needs to wake up and realize it. There are a couple of other supporting characters running around, including the villains and some cops chasing Nathan because they believe he’s in on the robbery, but they aren’t anything particularly compelling. Jacob Batalon turns up as Nathan’s only friend, and, like Midthunder, his charisma on screen is palpable. He needs to be in more movies immediately.
In terms of the action, the film is decent enough at what it wants to do. The whole shtick is that Nathan doesn’t really slow down because he doesn’t know that he needs to. So his reactions when someone tries to hit him or hurt him, and he doesn’t even flinch, is where a lot of the comedy lies. Quaid has an expressive face, so it works more than it doesn’t. Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen don’t shy away from the gore and the various ways that Nathan is taking the abuse. They also come up with some clever ways that he takes advantage of his disability while reminding us that he is hurt and doesn’t know how hurt he is.
Novocaine doesn’t reinvent a single wheel, but it’s very honest about what it is, which means you know whether or not you’ll be into it. Much like torture porn in horror, you can either handle this sort of thing or you really can’t. The first fight, which is all over the trailers, involved hot grease and a human hand. If that’s the first big fight, you can only imagine things get more wild from there. Novocaine might go on a bit too long in the second act as it tries to have a few too many twists and turns, but it’s ultimately pretty good at what it sets out to do. You can’t ask much more from a film that openly features this much punishment of a human body for the sake of comedy.
Novocaine
Review by Kaitlyn Booth
7.5/10
Novocaine is a film that is helped by the marketing, selling it for exactly what it is: a “cringe comedy” where you wince every time you watch Jack Quaid get hurt in more and more over-the-top ways. It doesn’t quite run out of steam but is a film that would be better with a tight 90-minute edit.
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