Painful for the Rest of Us

Sometimes there are films that come along that you say, “sure, I’ll see that at some point… but not in theaters.” I tend to feel bad during those moments because I know a lot of people worked on the movie and that they tried to make something good. Not just the actors, the director, the writers, but all the camera people, costumers, makeup artists, effects people, lighting people, runners, gofers, and on and on. This is their livelihood and even for a smaller, lower-budget movie, they clearly tried to do the best they could and make something that would get people into theaters… and then I see the trailer and say, “eh, maybe later.”

And yet that’s a fair way to describe Novocaine, the action-comedy that came and went through theaters in the early part of 2025. It’s not that it’s a bad movie, mind you. It’s fun, it’s silly at times, and it delivers on all the promises of its premise (as unlikely and illogical as that premise might be). But it’s not a film you go out of your way to see. The actors are game and the story does kind of work, but unless you happen upon it on a streaming service, you’re unlikely to say, “yeah, I need to watch that.” If you had been you would have been one of the few to help propel this $18 Mil budgeted indie to its $34.2 Mil take during its theatrical run. Not a big Box Office run, and maybe not even enough to qualify it as a success. It just did… okay.

And that’s because it’s an okay movie. That’s fine; smaller films don’t have to be amazing to help pay the bills. Watching this film, though, you feel like there’s something more that could have been done with it, some other twist that was needed to actually turn this into more than it is. The film feels like it’s missing some magic that could have made it better. More action, more comedy, more pathos… something. That vital ingredient is missing in the full film and, really, it felt like it was missing in all the promotional materials as well. This is a fine film, but one that no one really felt like going out of their way to see. And that was predictable.

Novocaine stars Jack Quaid as Nathan Caine, an assistant manager at a bank who also has a debilitating condition. Nathan was born without the ability to feel pain. He can feel certain things, like pressure, but extremes like heat, cold, and pain, don’t register for him. Because of this, Nathan lives a very moderated, controlled life. He runs on a tight schedule, setting alarms for everything, even pee breaks. He doesn’t eat food, instead taking everything as ground-down smoothies that he doesn’t need to chew (because he could bite off his tongue and not realize it). He plays it incredibly safe because, otherwise, he could suffer an injury at any moment and not even notice it.

And then along comes Sherry (Amber Midthunder), a teller at the bank that Nathan instantly develops a crush for. She eventually invites him out to lunch, and even convinces him to have a bite of pie (which he loves). She then gets him to go out to an art show, and the two hit it off from there. Things are going great, and Nathan thinks he’s met the girl of his dreams… except reality comes crashing back in when three men dressed as Santas come into the bank and rob the place, kidnapping Sherry and taking her hostage. With the cops failing to follow the robbers, Nathan steals a cop car and goes on the pursuit. He might not be trained but he has one thing that will help him save the day: his “super power” that makes him ignore all the damage he’s about to sustain saving the girl he loves.

To be quite honest, Novocaine is a really stupid movie. You have to buy into the premise that someone with congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA) would not only be able to have anything approaching a normal life (aside from his timers, not eating solid food, and having tennis balls on sharp corners around his apartment, Nathan seems perfectly fine) instead of, you know, having a debilitating condition that can ruin their bodies in short order. The movie, in Hollywood fashion, plays off a serious condition not just as a joke but as a super power.

In a way this is a lot like all those depictions of autistic people in movies and shows where their condition ends up being their greatest strength. There’s more to these problems than the one thing that Hollywood thinks makes them superheroes, but that’s never touched on in these works. Nathan, impervious to pain as he is, should have been dropped by the robbers at the first sign of trouble because while he can’t feel it, his body still takes all kinds of damage it would never be able to recover from, and in short order as well.

If you can somehow set all that aside (which I wasn’t ever really able to do during the whole run of this movie) then you can kind of find a way to enjoy portions of this film. That’s in large part because, for all the film’s flaws it does have a couple of charismatic leads at the center of the story. Jack Quaid has been on the rise, going from one of many actors in ensemble works to taking the lead in a few smaller films. Novocaine is Quaid’s bid to become something more, and he’s not bad in the role so long as what you want is an affable guy that can stutter his way through scenes and look like he’s in over his head. I would never say he was truly convincing as an action hero but he at least accents the comedy of the film about as well as can be expected.

Amber Midthunder is also great, and she makes for a very charming presence in this film. You can easily see why Nathan could instantly fall head over heels for this woman, and when she shows that she really cares for him as well it helps to sell the whole conceit of the story. Unfortunately because she’s also the hostage for the three robbers (which, well, plays into later events we won’t spoil) that also means that the film sidelines her for whole chunks of the runtime. You really wish the film could have done more with her so she could be co-lead in the movie instead of playing second fiddle to the plot.

And that plot really gets silly the further along it goes. The film tries to play a late-stage twist that changes everything you think you know except (without spoiling it) I guess the twist pretty early and I was bored when it finally came to fruition. The film probably would have been better without it, letting the events play more normally, especially because it would have upped the tension in the film and made it feel like Nathan was really breaking apart his body for a worthy cause. You want to cheer for him, but the film gets so twisty that it becomes hard to do so.

All of this is for a while that is confused over what it even wants to be. It wants to use Nathan as a prop, effectively, using his disorder as a super power so it can parade him through a series of scenes where he gets more and more destroyed. Ironically, though, it’s in the moments where he just acts like Nathan, like calling up another bank to do a credit check on a robber so he can find their home address, that we see his real super power: he’s a nice guy that’s pretty damn competent at his job. A bank manager that has to use his brains to find the people that kidnapped the woman he loves might not have as catchy of a hook as a film about a man that can’t feel pain, but it’s also a much more interesting movie.

I liked Nathan when he was just Nathan a whole hell of a lot more than when the film forces him to be a superhero. Those moments were great and they made me stop thinking about how stupid this film was and how much it didn’t understand what Nathan’s day-to-day life actually had to be like. Nathan is lucky to be healthy and normal, something the film makes a passing mention of, but it never really invests in him as a character to understand what that truly means. In doing so it gives the lead character, and his film, the short end of the stick.