Novocaine follows Nathan Caine, a man who turns his inability to feel pain into an unexpected advantage as he fights a bunch of thugs to get the woman of his dreams back after she is kidnapped.
Jack Quaid is off to a phenomenal start in 2025 — with Companion in January and now Novocaine in March. He proved himself as a charming, charismatic leading man, and that’s no different here. Quaid is able to pull off some absolutely hilarious moments with his range.
The action sequences are also (mostly) great here. Novocaine utilizes several creative shooting techniques, quickly rotating and tracking the characters’ movements to generate a surreal feeling. The action is also heightened by the central premise, as it’s able to stretch the realm of plausibility more generously due to Nate’s condition. This leads to a multitude of comedic moments and over-the-top violence.
Novocaine features multiple twists and turns, but… they do come at a cost. The flick contains several genuinely surprising moments that I didn’t see coming. However, with these revelations, also come very questionable character decisions.
Novocaine asks the audience to buy into these characters, spending almost the entire first 30 minutes on development. By the end, it almost feels like the movie is counting on you to forget everything that you learned. Because of this, the romance aspect of the film is fairly weak and even frustrating at times.
Novocaine is 110 minutes long. The opening act takes its time to set up the characters, but from then on, it’s nonstop action. The train eventually begins to steer off the tracks as the movie nears its end.
What felt like a tight-knit script slowly began to unravel. Characters make bizarre decisions that stretched any sense of believability to its edge. Despite this, the film still manages to end on a satisfying note of Nate finding an identity in himself that had been hidden before.
Novocaine is good but falls short of being great. The character development is supberb over the first three-fourths of the movie before falling off a cliff at the end. I can forgive Novocaine’s shortcomings to some degree, but Nate’s journey feels much less impactful because of this. Still, this is a serviceable action-comedy that will certainly be enjoyed by the vast majority of moviegoers.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
