NOVOCAINE : Tuesday 8th April 2025

I saw the MA15+ Rated 'NOVOCAINE' earlier this week, and this American action comedy film is Directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen whose prior feature film Directing collaborations take in 'Body' in 2015, 'Stake Land II' in 2016, 'Villains' in 2019 and 'Significant Other' in 2022. This film has received generally positive reviews from critics, and has so far grossed US$32M from a production budget of US$18M since its US release in mid-March.

We meet mild-mannered and introverted Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) as his morning alarm gets him out of bed on 23rd December. After his early morning routine he arrives at his place of work as the Assistant Manager at a Trust Credit Union in San Diego. Sherry Margrave (Amber Midthunder) is a co-worker who seemingly is more romantically interested in Nathan that he is of her. She invites him out for lunch that day and reluctantly he agrees. He orders a milk shake and she orders the last slice of cherry pie, which she says is the best on the west coast. She offers him a bite but he refuses, saying that he suffers from congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA) which basically means he cannot feel pain, and if he were to bite his tongue off while chewing it could be fatal for him. She persuades him to take a bite, which he reluctantly does and his face lights up. 

Later that evening the pair agree to meet up at a local bar, where they chat idly over a drink when Nathan is approached by his middle-school bully, who calls him 'Novocaine'. Sherry gets revenge for Nathan by tricking the bully into drinking a shot of extra hot chilli sauce. The pair leave the bar and head back to Nathan's apartment where they have sex.

The next morning Nathan is on cloud nine like he has just lost his cherry for the first time. It is Christmas Eve, and a gang of three robbers dressed up in Santa suits led by Simon Greenly (Ray Nicholson) rob the Credit Union. Simon murders Nathan's boss Nigel (Craig Jackson) when he won't divulge the combination to the vault, and takes Sherry as a hostage, as the Police show up in force and an intense shoot-out ensues. Nathan impulsively steals a cop car in pursuit of the car in which Sherry is being held, but he follows the wrong car and ends up in a confrontation with another robber, Ben Clark (Evan Hengst), in a restaurant kitchen. He eventually shoots Ben dead through the head, but not before severely burning his hand while retrieving Ben’s gun from a deep fat fryer. 

Ben had a distinctive tattoo on his upper arm, which Nathan takes a photo of, and asks his only friend, Roscoe Dixon (Jacob Batalon), a gamer whom he has never met in person, to help him find the artist. He successfully tracks down the artist, Zeno (Garth Collins) a man three times the size of Nathan and built like a brick out house, and unsuccessfully asks him for Ben's address, hoping to find Sherry. Sensing something is not right with Nathan's line of questioning he turns on Nathan and the pair fight it out. After a brawl, Nathan manages to get Ben's last name from Zeno, and he calls a colleague to find Ben's home address using his loan documents. 

Andre (Conrad Kemp), Ben's brother, has become agitated that Ben has not shown up at their rendezvous and so tells Simon that he's going to Ben's place to see if there is any sign of his brother there. Meanwhile, Nathan has arrived at the house to find it booby-trapped, and ends up stuck upside down dangling in a snare. Out of desperation he calls Roscoe to come and rescue him. A short time later Andre enters the house and finds a hanging by one leg Nathan and begins to torture him, who fakes (somewhat unconvincingly) feeling pain. Roscoe arrives, and together they overpower and kill Andre. Police Officers Mincy Langston (Betty Gabriel) and her partner Coltraine Duffy (Matt Walsh) arrive at the house and arrest Roscoe who made off on his Vespa, thinking they had Nathan with whom he had switched clothes.

Nathan tracks down Sherry and Simon at an auto repair shop and discovers she is Simon's sister and an accomplice to the robbery. She originally had intended to seduce Nathan to learn the bank vault code but developed real feelings for him (and was horrified that Simon needlessly murdered her boss, Nigel). Simon tries to kill Nathan against Sherry's protests, but he is shot by an arriving Coltraine, while Sherry and Nathan are arrested. Simon rises from his bullet wound and shoots Coltraine dead and wounds Mincy with a bullet to her lower side, and then makes a daring escapee in the ambulance holding a handcuffed Nathan to a stretcher. Sherry frees herself from the handcuffs, and she chases the ambulance while Roscoe takes a wounded Mincy to the hospital. 

Nathan regains consciousness, and breaks free from the handcuffs by dislocating his thumb so that his hand slips through the cuffs. He then uses a defibrillator device on Simon, causing him to crash, with the pair fighting it out in the back of the ambulance which has come to rest on its side. Having had enough of Nathan, Simon breaks his arm in a compound fracture that sees about six inches of bone protruding out of Nathan's lower arm. Sherry arrives, and she gets into a brutal fight with her brother, and as soon as he is about to plant a bullet in her head, Nathan injects himself with a syringe of adrenaline and kills Simon by sticking his exposed arm bone through Simon's jaw before falling unconscious, finally plum tuckered out from his many injuries.

Nathan comes round two weeks later on 11th January in a hospital bed bandaged up from neck to toe, with Roscoe by his side. Mincy enters the room and says that she has just returned from the courthouse where he has been sentenced to six months of house arrest and five years of probation instead of a lengthy prison sentence due to his saving the life of the cop whose car he took to pursue Sherry. One year later and Nathan has fully recovered and he visits Sherry in prison, who has eight months left to serve for her role in the robbery. They share a cherry pie to mark the one year anniversary of their first date, as the prison guard calls time on their visit and leads Sherry back to her cell, Nathan chews on the pie with a big grin on his face.

With 'Novocaine' Directors Berk and Olsen have delivered us a film with its tongue planted firmly in its cheek, with a lighthearted romcom masquerading as an action thriller that ramps up the pain threshold to 11 for everyone else except Nathan, while giving him every excuse to up the ante on the bloodletting, the violence, gore and the manner in which our protagonist here gets injured and just carries on regardless. This is a film straight out of the Looney Tunes playbook and is story that I'm sure got its inspiration from Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, but nonetheless it is entertaining enough, and the two leads in Quaid and Midthunder are both right on the money here that help elevate this film above the also rans in the action genre. 

'Novocaine' merits three claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a possible five claps.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-