Jack Quaid Lifts Gimmicky Action-Comedy

As the saying goes, you gotta have a gimmick, even when it comes to action movies.

That’s certainly the case with the central character of Novocaine, Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s action-comedy about a man genetically incapable of feeling pain. As played winningly by Jack Quaid, Nathan Caine is a new kind of action hero. He’s not so great at dishing it out, but boy, can he take it.

A mild-mannered assistant bank manager who lives a quiet existence due to the inherent risks of his condition — even solid food is a danger, since he could bite his tongue off and not even feel it — Nate spends his workdays pining for new bank teller Sherry (Amber Midthunder) and his free time playing video games with his only friend Roscoe, whom he’s never met in person.

But when Sherry coaxes him out of his shell and asks him out, Nate’s life changes immediately. After their first night together, he’s thoroughly in love. So it’s all the more traumatic for him when a trio of bank robbers (Conrad Kemp, Evan Hengst and Ray Nicholson, the last displaying some of his father Jack’s trademark charisma) invade the bank the next day and kidnap Sherry.

After the cops who show up on the scene are struck down, Nate steals a police car and chases after the robbers himself, desperate to rescue his new love. Meanwhile, he’s pursued by a pair of detectives (Betty Gabriel and the reliably funny Matt Walsh), who suspect he was in on the job from the beginning.

Cue the violent, excuse me, ultra-violent, mayhem that ensues during Nate’s heroic quest, with his rare disorder coming in particularly handy when it comes to his scrapes with the bad guys. Very quickly, Nate learns to use his affliction to his advantage via such methods as grabbing a blazing hot frying pan and pummeling his stunned opponent with it during a kitchen fight.

Injuries? No problem. After getting shot in another confrontation, he merely stops by a friend’s hardware store, grabs some pliers to pull out the bullet from his arm and superglues the wound, without feeling a thing. Of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone regularly did this sort of thing during their action movie heyday, but they weren’t usually grinning and making quips at the same time.

Scriptwriter Lars Jacobson finds ingenious ways to exploit Nate’s condition for laughs while filmmakers Berk and Olsen mine the concept for all its visual worth. The numerous fight scenes, which often lapse into extreme gore, are as amusing as they are exciting, with one sequence, in which Nathan falls victim to an array of booby traps installed in one of the bank robber’s homes, funnily riffing both visually and verbally on Home Alone.

In perhaps the single funniest scene, Nathan has to feign pain while being tortured by one of the bad guys to stall for enough time for his friend Roscoe to rescue him. You’ll find yourself laughing at Nate’s atrociously bad acting while at the same time closing your eyes to avoid the sight of his fingernails being pulled off. When Roscoe does show up, he’s not quite the macho figure he claimed to be, but since he’s played by Jacob Batalon, familiar from the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, his presence is reassuring nonetheless.

Novocaine, which amusingly employs REM’s “Everybody Hurts” to accompany the opening credits, would probably have eventually worn out its welcome (it still feels overlong at 110 minutes) were it not for Quaid’s terrific performance. As endearing here as he was creepy in the recent Companion, the young actor displays the burgeoning star power necessary to sustain this essentially one-joke premise. The opening section feels like the beginning of a fine romantic comedy, with the talented Midthunder matching him in appeal. Although if you’ve seen her star-making turn in Prey, you immediately suspect that her character will be no mere damsel in distress.