The man who coined the phrase “Life is pain” never met Nathan Caine. Nate is afflicted with an extremely rare genetic disorder called “congenital insensitivity to pain analgesia” that makes him incapable of feeling any sort of pain. (Yes, it’s real.) To a moviegoing public drowning in comic-book movies, that might sound like a superpower. To Nate, it’s more curse than gift.
It’s important for a person to feel pain. Pain keeps us alive. It tells us to move our hand away from a fire before we permanently damage our hand, or to go see a doctor so that an illness or an infection can be treated. Nate never gets those warnings, so to protect himself he lives a life covered in almost literal bubble wrap. He never eats solid foods out of fear of accidentally biting through his tongue. He tops his pencils with puddy; he has tennis balls on every door handle and desk corner, lest he puncture himself without noticing. When he’s not working as an assistant bank manager in San Diego, he’s avoiding danger at home, mostly playing MMORPGs with his only friend — a voice in his headphones that he’s never even met (the voice of Jacob Batalon).
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Of course, there wouldn’t be much of a movie if Nate (Jack Quaid) just stayed in his house for 100 minutes. Sure enough, just a few minutes into the action comedy Novocaine, he finally says yes after a lifetime of no — to a beautiful and charming new teller at his bank named Sherry (Amber Midthunder). They go out for lunch and (gasp!) he actually takes a bite of solid food. Pretty soon, Nate’s doing all kinds of stuff that’s out of character. He meets Sherry at a bar, he takes her home, and then, when Sherry is kidnapped during a bank robbery he sets off to rescue her.
Why doesn’t Nate let the police handle it? I’m afraid you’re just going to have to not ask that question if you want to enjoy Novocaine. To appreciate the film’s pluses, namely some very clever action set pieces built around Nate’s condition, you will also need to endure a bunch of minuses, primarily a plot full of completely implausible twists. I suppose if you can accept that Jack Quaid cannot feel it when he’s shot with an arrow, you can accept that a bank robber might booby trap his entire house Home Alone style for basically no reason other than it makes a great place to torture Nate. Buy the ticket, take the ride, and all of that.
The script, by Lars Jacobson, oscillates between eye-rollingly silly moments like that one, others that are ingenious — like a scene where one of the bank robbers catches Nate and tortures him for kicks, and Nate has to pretend he’s in agony in order to keep his attacker from realizing that this is all part of Nate’s (admittedly not very good) survival plan. While I can’t say it always feels like Jacobson and directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen have fully thought through the mechanics of their story, it does feel like they have brainstormed every possible way they could wring comedy and body horror out of this scenario.
It also helps that they have a very game Jack Quaid as their unlikely protagonist. With his lanky physicality, he looks the part of a dude who has never left his house, and he really sells Nate’s head-over-heels attraction to Sherry. He also has solid chemistry with Midthunder, although the film’s structure means they spend a large chunk of the movie apart.
I cannot justify nor explain most of the decisions Novocaine’s characters make. Ultimately, I was willing to simply let them wash over me like a heavily medicated dental patient, because I got enough of a kick out the film’s dark sense of humor and its surprisingly graphic violence.
Novocaine belongs to the same cinemasochistic tradition as movies like Evil Dead II and Crank, where the audience is invited to derive twisted pleasure from watching a heroic leading man get the crap beaten out of him in inventive ways. It’s not as good as those movies. But on its own terms, it’s painless enough. Pleasurable even.
Additional Thoughts:
-I mentioned the house that is inexplicably booby-trapped like it’s Macaulay Culkin’s summer cottage. One of the traps involves a mace. Like a medieval mace! Where do you even get a mace in 2025?!?
-By the way, the man who said “Life is pain” was the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride. (The full line is “Life is pain, your highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.”) Technically, we should credit screenwriter William Goldman for that one.
RATING: 6/10
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