Directors – Dan Berk, Robert Olsen – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 110m
*****
An assistant bank manager who is medically unable to feel pain pursues the bank robbers who have kidnapped his brand new and first ever girlfriend – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 28th
(There have been several other movies with this title. Apart from having the same title, this one appears to be completely original.)
San Diego, California. Driving to work in gridlock, Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) is the type to annoy fellow motorists by obsessively maintaining the correct space in front of his vehicle when no-one else is doing so. At work, he’s the assistant bank manager. He’s a genuinely nice guy who genuinely cares from people, such as long-standing customer Earl (Lou Beatty Jr.) who Nate helps through an unpleasant foreclosure on his workshop by doing things on a schedule that will help ease the man’s pain.
Also, there’s this new teller Sherry (Amber Midthunder) at the bank who Nate rather likes but can’t bring himself to talk to. In fact, despite her obvious attentions, he goes out of his way to avoid talking to her.
Somehow, she talks him into a lunch date where she has cherry pie and he… doesn’t. Because he’s worried it will burn his mouth. Because, as he explains, he suffers from a rare genetic disorder which means that he can’t feel pain. So he protects himself by cutting himself off from any and all possible danger sources of danger. Outside of work, he never goes out, instead staying at home to play videogames with an online buddy he’s never met called Roscoe.
Despite his misgivings, Sherry gets him to try a slice of cherry pie. He is wowed. Then she invites him to join her at a local bar that evening, which goes well because, emboldened by Sherry’s interest in him, he takes on a former school bully played by Tristan de Beer (“It’s Novocaine – I thought you’d be dead by now!”) by drinking shots with him at the bar. Shots of hot pepper sauce which Nate can’t feel but his swiftly debilitated companion can. Sherry, suitably impressed, brings him home for a night of passion.
The next day at work, Nate is feeling understandably pleased with himself. Life is good. Until three Santa Clauses enter the bank. To do an armed robbery. First their leader gets the manager Nigel (Craig Jackson) at gunpoint, threatening to shoot him if he doesn’t give up the vault combination. He doesn’t. He is shot. Next, they get Nate, who plans to be similarly heroic. When they inflict pain on him, it has no effect. Realising there’s something between Nate and Sherry, they threaten to inflict pain on her. Nate will do anything to save Sherry; he gives them the combination. They load the money into sacks.
The police arrive. A hostage would help the robbers. They take Sherry. They make a getaway.
Nate has gone from a safe existence through romantic elation to despair in under 24 hours. He has to get Sherry back. There is a shoot out outside the bank as cops are shot and robbers escape in two cars with hostage and money. Realising that by the time backup cops arrive, the crooks will have got away, Nate steals a police car (pausing to tie up the wound of a profusely bleeding, wounded cop) and sets off in pursuit…
To the credit of the clever, original screenplay by Lars Jacobson, shrewd casting and directing by Berk and Olson, and a terrific performance by leading man Quaid, everything that follows takes the audience with it even as it builds on the previously laid dramatic foundations.
The film clearly lays out its three villains in two fleeing cars: gang leader Simon (Ray Nicholson), an ex-military type every bit as inherently nasty as Nate is inherently good; his sidekick brothers Andre (Conrad Kemp) and, in the second car, Ben (Evan Hengst).
It also lays out its two pursuing cops, one female and one male (the pragmatic yet compassionate Mincy and the by-the-book Coltraine, played by Betty Gabriel and Matthew Walsh) and assorted further characters including Nate’s videogame buddy Roscoe (Jacob Batalon), called out of internet gaming anonymity to come to our hero’s rescue, and towering tattoo parlour owner Zeno (Garth Collins) who might provide Nate with the details of Simon’s (and therefore Sherry’s) current whereabouts.
The film is, among other things, a lesson in casting: every single actor from the biggest to the smallest roles is put in a role so suited to them that they are given the chance to shine, which, one way or another, they all do. (The last film I saw that did this so effectively was the very different Hard Truths, Mike Leigh, 2024. I doubt Berk and Olsen could make that just as I doubt Mike Leigh could make this. Both are among those rare films that should be watched by all casting directors.)
The main thing Novocaine has going for it is the idea of someone who can’t feel pain even as he goes about getting back his girl. He catches up with Ben first, leading to a delirious fight in a kitchen, which uses the space as efficiently as Spielberg did in his kitchen scene in Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993). This one has such stunt devices as a gun lying in a pan of hot cooking fat. No-one would plunge their hand into the fat to pick that gun up unless they couldn’t feel any pain. But the sensory-numb Novocaine, as we come to know him, is not ordinary in that respect.
Later, he goes to a booby-trapped house where a mace-ball drops from the ceiling to spike his back and a tripped crossbow shoots a bolt through his leg. In neither case does Novocaine feel anything – he just carries on. Even when a knife is thrown to him and pierces his palm, rather than an injury, it weaponises that body part against an oncoming adversary.
The stunt scenes are beautifully choreographed, worthy of Hard Boiled (John Woo, 1992, and one of the films the directors had Quaid watch along with Die Hard, John McTiernan, 1988 – incidentally another action movie set at Christmas – and the first two Lethal Weapon movies, Richard Donner, 1989 & 1987) and the John Wick films (Chad Stahelski, 2023, 2019, 2017, 2014). But Novocaine’s scenes all have this peculiar edge, resulting from the fact the hero feels no pain and therefore could do things no other protagonist could. The screenplay, directors, stars and stunt crew have a lot of fun playing with this notion, and exploit it to the max. You will be pleasantly (if that’s the word) surprised over and over.
Underneath all of this superb mayhem, at the risk of restating the obvious, is the fact that the central character simply wants to save the girl he has just fallen head over heels in love with. That is ultimately what propels the film forward and holds the audience in its emotional grip. It may not be about to win any Oscars (not least since, for reasons best known to the Academy, it doesn’t award any in a stunt category), yet in terms of both filmmaking craft and sheer, visceral, emotionally compelling entertainment, it’s as good as anything else out there.
A thoroughly enjoyable Friday night* movie and one hell of a ride.
*Okay, so I watched it on a Thursday night. But the argument still stands.
Novocaine is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 28th.
Trailer: