Movie Review: Over-The-Top Violence Can't Save "Novocaine" From Being Mind-Numbingly Boring

3/5 ForReel Score | 1.5/5 Stars

Action films have thrived on the “one-man army” trope for as long as the genre has been alive. Classics like Die Hard and Rambo, 2000s cheese such as Taken and the Bourne movies, as well as new-wave films like John Wick and The Raid, have been cornerstones in a subgenre that seems to have a government mandate for at least one a year. 2024 offered a full range of these, from the bargain-bin classic The Beekeeper to the criminally underseen The Shadow Strays, signifying that these types of movies, like it or not, will be box office mainstays for the foreseeable future. This year, one of 2025’s earlier-mandated one-man army movies, Novocaine, led by the charmingly dorky Jack Quaid, is about as numbing as the drug it’s named after.

Novocaine follows Nathan Caine, an assistant bank manager who suffers from a genetic condition where he can’t feel pain. Nathan’s condition forces him to take extra precaution in his life, such as keeping tennis balls on the corners of his furniture, puterasers on the tips of his newly sharpened pencils (why not just put them eraser-side up? Or use pens? Mechanical pencils?), and drink liquid food to avoid biting his tongue off. It’s a cute character quirk that works well with the budding romance he’s developing with one of the bank tellers, Sherry, played by Amber Midthunder. For the first twenty minutes or so, I was actually enjoying Novocaine and the romantic chemistry between Quaid and Midthunder, but my enjoyment turned to dread, knowing that this would shift into an action movie instead of remaining a straightforward romance. The bank eventually gets robbed, blood gets spilled, Sherry gets taken hostage, and it’s up to Nathan to stop them before she gets hurt.

The rest of the movie follows Nathan’s pursuit of the robbers as he takes them out, using his lack of pain reception as an advantage to fight the bad guys one by one. It’s an interesting premise, but the execution is so half-baked that I was wincing out of cringe in the theater. It’s never fun to be one of the only people not laughing in the room, as my friend and I exchanged tired looks at one another while laughing at, not with, the movie. It comes with the same overworn, snarky, Deadpool-esque comedy that feels like nails on a chalkboard to listen to, with loads of “That’s gotta leave a mark!” and “Uh, that just happened!” lines of dialogue that feel like they hired a fourteen-year-old to write a feature-length script. Like most action movies, Novocaine is at its best when it’s fighting and bloodshed, but Novocaine is at its worst with pretty much everything else.

It’s hard to watch Novocaine without seeing the films it’s aping done worse, such as the Jason Statham-led trash-masterpiece Crank or the “save the girl” sensibilities of pretty much every action movie ever. By the third act, I was begging for the credits to roll, but I was not granted the gift of a swift runtime. It’s probably twenty minutes too long, but I don’t know that a tight ninety would’ve helped things very much, either. The fight choreography is serviceable, and directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen bother to move the camera in sometimes-interesting ways, but most of this movie had me wishing that I couldn’t feel the crushing pain of boredom. There are some standout set pieces of a kitchen brawl and a house that’s filled with booby traps, but Novocaine rarely goes far enough to be exciting. There are some wince-worthy moments of self-surgery and fingernail torture, but the gross factor could’ve been upped significantly. A majority of the time, the execution of Novocaine’s concept feels safer than some action films where people actually can feel pain. 

From a narrative standpoint, Novocaine is, unsurprisingly, a genuine mess. It contains far too many subplots for me to stay invested in without anything to care about, including infighting between the robbers, a duo of cops tailing Nathan, and a hackneyed surprise twist that made my eyes roll so far back that I was afraid they would get stuck. The final action sequence is prolonged to a devastating degree, with a villainous performance from Ray Nicholson that is as cookie-cutter “adrenaline-junkie criminal” as action villains get.

For all of the fantastic action movies that we’ve gotten in the 2020s thus far, Novocaine feels like an unfortunate step down from its contemporaries. Admittedly, expectations weren’t high, but the results were even lower than I thought. The film’s already set up to get lapped by Gareth Evans’s Havoc and Timo Tjahjanto’s Nobody 2, and I’m sure it’ll make itself at home as a free selection on Amazon Prime in a few months. For those not numb to feeling, Novocaine can be too painful of an experience to tolerate.