James Dalton might have used “pain don’t hurt” as a mantra in Road House while beating the shit out of rednecks, but it’s more than just a pseudo-zen loan for Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid), the protagonist of Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s Novocaine. He was born with what’s known as CIP (Congenital insensitivity to pain), an extremely rare genetic disorder that does what it says on the tin: He can’t feel pain. At all. I’m sure that some of you are outright envious reading that, and I’m sympathetic — I deal with a fair amount of soreness and aches as well, and hate seeing those I love hurt for any reason, from a stubbed toe to truly debilitating chronic conditions that dramatically affect their day-to-day lives. CIP, however, is a proverbial “monkey’s paw” condition: It sounds good, but it’s more of a curse than a blessing. A person searching for near-supernatural relief from pain will soon discover how necessary that response is. Minor cuts and burns can fester for weeks without one realizing it; bones can be broken and stay unset; and the usual warning signs that something’s wrong within one’s body can lead to a whole host of afflictions going unnoticed until it’s too late. As Nate points out, his life expectancy was about 25 years, and it was a herculean effort on his part and the part of his parents for him to live as long as he has.
Novocaine is one of those movies in which the lead has to learn to live a little or whatever: Lars Jacobson’s script seems to suggest that his life is incomplete or lacking in some way because his condition has rendered him too safe and boring. Nate’s an assistant manager at a bank, though he’s more George Bailey than calloused hardass, as he frequently skirts the rules to help his customers avoid foreclosure (as seen early on in the film). It’s a job all about risk mitigation, which he knows quite a bit about, and it’s given him the ability to live comfortably. His apartment is covered in hobbies he’s picked up over the years. His body is adorned with gorgeous self-done tattoo work, a tapestry of imagery straight from the fantasy video games he plays with his buddy Roscoe (Jacob Batalan), whom he’s never met (Roscoe insists he looks like Jason Momoa, as well, so Nate’s in for a bit of a surprise when they finally do run into each other). But there’s always some destabilizing element that enters these characters’ lives, and it takes the form of Sherry (Prey’s Amber Midthunder), a new hire at the bank who takes an interest in him.
Their initial meet-cute takes place after she surprises Nate while he’s in the break room pouring a cup of coffee (into a mug full of ice), and he explains to her at a diner later on the specifics of his condition. A charred, red hand is the perfect thing to illustrate why he can’t take the bite of pie she’s offering him: he didn’t feel the coffee, so he won’t feel it if he bites his tongue while chewing. She pushes him to do it, encouraging him to enjoy it, reminding him of the low risk and that she’s there to help if something goes wrong. He does, and he’s delighted by it — pie, it turns out, is awesome. As they talk, their differences become apparent. If the absence of physical pain defines Nate’s life, Sherry’s is suffused with it, emotionally and otherwise, with her dark past being something she desperately wants to escape. The following day, Nate heads into work with that special glow about him, having passed third and been waved home the previous night, and he’s excited to see her again during the day. Well, until three well-armed Santa Clauses, led by Simon (Ray Nicholson), enter with automatic weapons and demand access to the vault. After killing Nate’s boss, they require that he give them the code, which he does (here’s a reminder in case you ever have the son of a Hollywood scion pointing an AR-15 in your face and demanding money: do not be a hero), and they decide to take a hostage to ensure a clean getaway. When Nate sees them drag Sherry out of the bank branch and into one of the cars the Clauses have waiting, something in him rises and says, “I’ve got to save her.” So begins Nate’s bloody odyssey to rescue this girl from these goons, which will lead him to some dark places and see him shrug off absurd injuries — CIP, like Sherry says, is basically a superpower.
More on that framing in a bit. In practice, Novocaine does a decent job at managing its opposing tones – a near-twee romantic comedy and a bleakly-funny action extravaganza – though I do wonder if it might have been an even better film had it chosen one of those lanes and stayed in it. The actors aim for whatever they think the tone will be, with Quaid’s plucky protagonist being the film’s strongest asset. Nate’s a witty goofball thrown into the mix of an action movie he’s not prepared for, which becomes a kind of North by Northwest case of “becoming the man you’re misidentified as” once the cops catch the trail of blood (mostly his own) and destruction he leaves in his wake. He eventually becomes a leather-jacket-sporting badass, leaving behind the goofy suit-and-tie combo as the injuries accumulate. Quaid plays this evolution with the requisite goofiness, never forgetting where the character’s heart is in all the chaos, and it’s delightful work, though one that makes me wish for a movie with more time for him to be a charming dork than a faux-John Wick. We love a secret badass (see Jason Statham’s recent career and Bob Odenkirk in Nobody). Nate’s self-discovery – from realizing that a bite of pie won’t kill him to finding out that plunging his hand into a deep fryer is a strategic advantage when he needs to grab a gun during a fight in a commercial kitchen – is amusingly rendered. Berk and Olsen are good with their actors, as anybody who saw Villains can tell you.
Likewise, the action is held back by a similar kind of compromise, in which they can’t make it too gross or weird to take advantage of the premise’s benefits, though it’s ultimately decently entertaining. A highlight is a fight in a tattoo shop, where Nate takes on a burly neo-Nazi and decides to go the same route Van Damme did in the finale of Kickboxer, minus the resin and hand wraps and with a whole lot of added blood. Again, Novocaine is decently amusing (if a little tiresome at 110 minutes, which reminded me that the Crank movies were only barely 90 minutes each), but it suffers from indecision on which bit to commit to. If I had to point to why, it’s because of CIP – the presence of this real-world condition, which sounds like it’d make for a solid logline at first blush before one realizes how goddamned sad it is without the assistance of Hollywood logic. I think the film that Quaid’s performance suggests would be a much lighter affair, and probably a more successful one: you could have that life-affirming wackiness without having to have your protagonist get chewed up like a Wolverine without the healing factor, and it would still have the same impact.
If Berk and Olsen wanted to go the genuinely dark route, there are plenty of bullshit explanations for why someone wouldn’t be able to feel pain, and a ton of ridiculous situations that their main character could find themselves in, provided we weren’t supposed to root for them in the same way. Again, the Crank movies figured out how to do this – an ever-evolving series of stakes-raising gambits with equally ridiculous results – but inflicting this much brutality (including a particularly bitter and kind of bullshit twist) on a character like this doesn’t feel particularly sporting. I’ve defended similarly wacky portrayals of real-world conditions in some movies before, and I will likely do so for The Accountant 2 when that comes out. Still, I understand why people find those films offensive. The difference is that Ben Affleck’s problems are often independent of his condition – they’re simply a part of his character, adding some color to the “stoic badass” archetype – while Quaid’s are the entire impetus for the story.
A viewer could walk away from this movie without realizing that this is an actual condition that some young people do suffer from, unless they’d heard about it beforehand, which kind of takes the “raising awareness” aspect of it out of Berk and Olsen’s sails. Novocaine is a clever film – I can imagine Jacobson’s “eureka” moment when he settled on using CIP as a conceit for a script – but there is such a thing as being too clever for one’s own good. The can of worms this movie opens up doesn’t entirely derail the fun, but I don’t know if audiences can shake off the discomfort should they do a bit of cursory googling after they leave the theater.