Gain Without the Pain?

Novocain isn't the first action film to utilise the gimmick of its lead character being unable to feel pain but no others have gone quite this far with the grizzly potential for body maiming violence. It is also the first to acknowledge the very serious day to day consequences of having such a condition.

Jack Quaid plays Nathan Caine, a mild mannered assistant credit union manager who lives an isolated life as he sufferers from CIPA (Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis). Not being able to feel pain means he blends all his food (to avoid chewing his tongue off), has baby proofed every hard corner in his vicinity and uses ice and a thermometer to drink his coffee. He keeps to himself at work and his only friend is online buddy Roscoe (Jacob Battalion) who he has never even met in person. Enter Amber Midthunder as sherry, a relatively new employee at the credit union who spills coffee on Nathan in the break room leading to a romantic night together. The following day, armed robbers led by Ray Nicholson target the credit union and take Amber away as a hostage. In one of many acts of insane stupidity during the film, Nathan steals a cop car and heads off in pursuit, leading to lashings of cartoonish violence as the leading man uses his immunity to pain to overcome larger opponents despite his complete lack of fighting skills or experience.

The movie spends a good bit of time on the first portion of the story, showing Nathan's day to day challenges and why the connection with Amber is so important to him. Still, whether his crusade is romantic and brave or stupid and creepily obsessive is a matter of opinion. Once his odesey begins things pick up considerably as Nathan's attempts at getting information invariably end up in grizzly confrontations. The fight choreography is nothing special but the lead's inability to feel pain is used in inventive ways as he mashes his hands into broken glass to create some impromptu spiked fists, melts his skin to get a gun and shrugs off booby traps without even noticing. On the downside, most of the most interesting bits have been shown in the trailer and the final showdown seems to last forever as the main villain shrugs off stab and gunshot wounds as if they where paper cuts. The strongest parts of the film are when it leans into slapstick comedy with a scene where Nathan stalls for time by pretending to be in agony under torture a stand out.

Quaid is good in the lead role although it is really just another shade of the awkward geek character he seems to be entrenched in portraying. This is probably the most earnest he has ever played it and he handles the comedy beats expertly. Playing to type is a bit of a theme among the cast as Battalion is the loyal best buddy we're used to seeing in the Spiderman movies and Ray Nicholson is unhinged. Betty Gabriel and Matt Walsh provide some laughs as the deadpan detectives following two steps behind but don't really bring anything to the plot. Midthunder gets more to do than simply be the damsel in distress but still feels underused and the film would have benefited from finding a way to make her more of a co lead.

Novocain is a perfectly entertaining actioner with a couple of real laughs but unless you are into wince inducing physical violence there isn't really anything to lift it above any number of other entries. If you are a fan of Jack Quaid being Jack Quaid or want to see someone impale an advisory with their exposed ulna bone then you are in for a treat.

6 knives through the hand out of 10

Comments

An Apple a Day

Bad Apples opens with a colourful procession of apples making their way through a processing facility. There is a problem, though: stowing away is a solitary child's trainer, hidden amongst the apples and about to jam up the machine and bring the whole enterprise to a halt. Turns out a bad kid can do the same to a classroom, as poor Miss Maria Spencer (Saoirse Ronan) knows only too well. This darkly comic satire doesn't go much deeper than the above metaphor but it entertains and is propelled by a trio of strong performances. The offending trainer belongs to Danny (Eddie Waller), a disruptive pupil whose out of control behaviour has the timid Maria on the verge of losing her job. When Danny seriously injures another pupil and gets suspended, Maria goes to see his dad but ends up in a scuffle with the troublemaking youngster that leads to her imprisoning him in her basement. With the rascal out of the picture and nobody missing him much, things start to look pretty rosy for t...

One Dog and his Man

Heart of the Beast is a man and his dog against nature film. As such, it requires a lead who can be tough but also vulnerable and has the screen presence to draw the audience in without dialogue. This film has such a lead. It also has Brad Pitt. See, the star of the show really is ex-army dog Odin (played by a German Shepherd named Uber, with three of his sons helping out). Odin has metal teeth, an artificial leg and suffers from PTSD but soldiers on with the joyous spirit only a dog can muster. It's just as well, since he is the only thing holding his human, retired Special Forces Command Sergeant Major James Belmont (Pitt) together. Belmont is himself haunted by nightmares of the mission that left him and Odin as sole survivors and it's safe to say he isn't a people person. The pair are exploring the Alaskan wilderness when a potential heart attack leads to Belmont crashing his little plane and leaving them with an arduous and dangerous trek back to civilisation. That thi...

Sick in the Mud

Like its shape shifting titular character, Clayface attempts to be many things. Billed as DC's first horror movie, it is also a supervillain origin story, a modern-gothic romance, a tragedy and a crime drama. With all this in the pot, what it actually ends up feeling like is a throwback to the '90s/early 2000s era of comic book adaptations. A time of modest budgets for the genre, when studios cared less about shared world continuity and were prepared to let filmmakers have some fun with weird characters. Tom Rhys Harris stars as Matt Hagen, an actor who got out of the Gotham City slums and is now Academy Award nominated. His high flying life comes crashing down when he has a one night stand with the girlfriend of a prominent Gotham mobster and is left hideously scarred by the scorned gangster's vengeance. With his career in ruins, he finds showbiz loyalty in short supply as his manager, lawyer and possibly even his best friend quickly abandon him. Scientist Dr. Caitlyn Co...

Predator Chadlands

After revitalising the Predator franchise with 2022's Prey, director Dan Trachtenberg brings us a very different take on the extraterrestrial big game hunter. In Predator: Badlands , the titular monster is the main character. Considering how terrible that premise could have been, we actually end up with a decent action adventure movie. Our protagonist is Dek, a Yautja (the species name of the Predators) who is considered something of a runt. Such a runt in fact, that his dad wants to kill him for being a pitiful disgrace to the clan. After his brother saves him, he makes his way to "the Death Planet" Genna to hunt a supposedly unkillable monster in order to show his father who is boss and force the rest of the clan to put some respect on his name. When he gets there he discovers that, not only is all the wildlife deadly, but Weyland-Yutani ( yes, the evil corporation from Alien) have sent a bunch of synths there to collect and weaponise his prospective trophy. He forms an...

Eight is the Loneliest Number of Legs

Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into cinemas to deliver a much needed box office shot in the arm to the once invincible MCU and prove that the wall crawler is Marvel's most enduring hero. It delivers on the Spiderman feeling but loses steam as the 2 hour 20 minute runtime rolls on. Since everyone he cares about is either dead or has forgotten him after the events of No Way Home, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has been focusing solely on his Spider-Man duties. As a result, he has more or less eradicated organised crime in New York and is idolised by the city populace. On the downside, he is devoid of real human contact apart from phone calls to a detective and a grudging pseudo-friendship with gun toting vigilante Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), aka The Punisher. He still pines after his lost relationships with MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) and it seems his isolation is beginning to have a physical effect on him. This couldn't come at a worse time, with a new threat that can s...

Irreverent Evil

Despite its singular name, Resident Evil is actually the eighth film to be based on the long running video game franchise. Unlike Paul W.S. Anderson's decade plus running series and 2021's failed reboot, Welcome to Raccoon City, this new effort from Weapons helmer Zach Cregger uses none of the game's characters or plot lines. Ironically, ditching the baggage has allowed Cregger to craft something that comes much closer to matching the camp terror of its source material and is easily the best film to wear the Resident Evil name. The entire film follows medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) on the delivery from hell. Despite being in the middle of a phone argument with his pregnant girlfriend, Brian accepts one last job for the day; a drop-off in remote Raccoon City. The icy roads he is ill prepared for turn out to be the least of his worries as something has gone very wrong in the mountain city. After running a woman over in the town outskirts, things quickly escalated and...

Straight Outta The Further

Insidious has always been a fairly low tier horror franchise. The Conjuring's budget cousin, if you will. If you look at it that way then Insidious: Out of the Further is actually fairly good. It's certainly the most entertaining the series has been since the first instalment. Like that first breakout hit from back in 2010, Out of the Further has a much stronger first half than it does second. We start with a fairly harrowing scene of a young girl named Gemma witnessing the grisly death of her erratically behaving mother. We then fast forward a couple of decades to find the adult Gemma working as a dentist while raising a young girl of her own, yet still living in her childhood home. Spooky things begin to happen as some unfriendly OAPs start stalking the neighbourhood and Gemma tries to keep her daughter safe while worrying she is becoming like her mother. In typical Insidious fashion, things become more silly than scary as the plot is revealed and we build towards a ludicr...

2025 Movies Ranked

Another year in the rear view mirror means another ranking of every new release film I caught in the cinema this year. Despite 75 films making the list there are some fairly big omissions so if your favourite isn't on here, just imagine it up near the top. Also, we are talking UK releases. 75. The Stranger Chapter 2 This lame duck franchise props up the rankings for the second year in a row. A little more happens this time round but there is no jeopardy since we know the protagonist needs to make it to part 3. Also undermines its main premise (people might just decide to murder you for no reason) by giving the masked killers backstory. At least a section with a wild boar trying to gut somebody means the audience aren't the only ones nearly bored to death. 74. Hurry Up Tomorrow When a musician decides to write and star in their own movie the results are often pompus nonsense, so the problem with this effort from Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye isn't that its ridiculous...

Dance of Death

John Wick spin off, Ballerina , swaps out Keanu Reaves (mostly) for Ana de Armas but almost everything else remains pretty similar. We still have the intricately choreographed fighting in a dark gloss colour palette, minimal plot propped up by ridiculous lore and the same waffling dialogue. Series die hards rejoice, but for someone who zoned out somewhere during Chapter 3 and was distinctly unimpressed with John Wick 4, these films are becoming something of a chore. Eve Macarro (de Armas) is orphaned at a young age when assassins break into her home in an attempt to abduct her and her father (also an assassin) dies fighting them off. She is then raised by the "Ruska Roma" (more assassins, roughly 40% of the worlds population are assassins in the world of John Wick), who train her in the arts of both ballet and murder. After somebody from the faction that killed her dad attempts to off her, she embarks on a revenge quest, despite being explicitly forbidden from doing so by R...

Stars and Their Cars

Crime 101 is named for the California freeway one of the characters commits all his robberies along. It also doubles as describing his MO, he is successful because he makes sure he gets the fundamentals right every time. It can also describe the film itself, which nails the basics of making a slick crime thriller better than just about any other movie has in quite some time. The professional thief is Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth), a meticulous planner whose jobs never lead to anyone being hurt and are so well executed that nobody even has any idea they are all the work of one man. Nobody that is, except for Mark Ruffalo's Detective Lou Lubesnick, who is determined to catch the "101 Robber" even though his obsession is starting to lead to him being ostracised in the precinct. Both characters come into contact with high value insurance broker Sharon (Halle Berry) as Mike plans a big score and Lou joins the dots in an attempt to track him down. A potential fly in the ointmen...

Dan Says its Alright

Search This Blog