It’s quite fitting that Novocaine (now available on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is likely to test your desensitization to cinematic violence. This somewhat high-concept action comedy features Jack Quaid – the son of well-known figures Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan – as a timid guy who can’t feel pain, finding himself in a situation where his condition is an asset rather than a hindrance. Naturally, this predicament involves enduring a vast amount of brutal punishment, though, as we consider while watching the film, hopefully nothing that causes lasting injury or death, since he’s not invincible. He’s no Rambo or Chuck Norris – just an ordinary dude, not a human action figure, and there are only so many hits he can take, right?

The Gist: R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” plays over the opening credits, though the irony is somewhat superficial – Michael Stipe seems to sing about emotional pain, not physical ones like stubbing a toe or, more relevant to this movie, submerging a hand in a boiling deep fryer. Nate Caine (Quaid) lives with congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA), a real genetic condition that likely doesn’t function as portrayed in the film, but let’s not be too critical and just embrace the fantasy. He’s a quiet, modest, solitary man who meticulously manages his life to compensate for his condition – tennis balls on sharp corners, alarms to avoid bladder issues, liquid diets to prevent accidentally biting his tongue, and bleeding out (yikes). Nate works as an assistant manager at a bank, showing kindness by giving a new widower some leeway on mortgage payments for his struggling business. After work, Nate retreats home to play video games with his online friend Roscoe (Jacob Batalon), whom he’s never met in person. His life is limited in scope.

However, there’s a girl at his workplace who frequently appears in dreamy slow-motion shots from Nate’s perspective, Sherry (Amber Midthunder). Fortuitously, she accidentally bumps into him in the breakroom, leading to a coffee spill that results in a severe burn on his hand – even the meet-cute in this film involves an injury. She invites him out for lunch, which he awkwardly accepts, ultimately sharing the challenges of his pain-free life with this charming, intelligent, and clearly interested young woman. She persuades him to try a bite of her cherry pie, woo woo. Another date follows, and Sherry visits his place, inquiring whether he can feel pleasure – a question undoubtedly on our minds, though we never receive a clear answer, likely because many films today shy away from depicting sexual encounters. Nonetheless, the point is clear – our protagonist is in luurrve.

How much is he in luurrve, though? We’re about to find out. One day at work three Santa Clauses bust in with Uzis and Glocks, so they can spread some Xmas joy. No, that’s a lie – they wanna rob the joint. They wreak all kinds of havoc, roughing up Nate and grabbing Sherry as a hostage for their escape, blasting away at the cops as they burn rubber outta there. Nate dusts himself off, helps an injured cop, grabs the cop’s dropped pistol and hops in the cop car and tears off after the bad guys goose-chasing all over San Diego for his girl. So there’s your answer as to whether the sex was pleasurable for our dude. And so we get the inevitable: Nate gets into some gnarly fights and suffers stab wounds, bullet wounds, third-degree burns, contusions, bruises, impalements, broken bones and hangnails, and he pretty much shrugs it all off. Oh, forgot to mention that the leader of the robbers is played by Ray Nicholson, so this is all leading to a big fat nepo baby showdown!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Novocaine is an average-guy-loses-it movie crossed with an unsuspecting-hero movie, so it exists somewhere in the gray area between Falling Down and Nobody (or Love Hurts). 

Performance Worth Watching: Quaid continues to build his resume – he popped as a mainstay in the series The Boys, turned up in the two most recent Screams and now has a pair of headlining gigs in Companion and Novocaine, the former showing his capacity for caddishness, and the latter, his capacity for psychological sensitivity AND physical insensitivity. He might have enough It to be a go-to leading man, and may be transcending the condition that helps him as much as it hurts him: congenital superstar parents syndrome.

Memorable Dialogue: I’ll forego the funnier one-liners for a heartfelt utterance via Sherry: “Everybody’s hiding something. We’re all just looking for someone we can show it to.”

Sex and Skin: Just some precoital kissyface.

Our Take: Novocaine is just clever enough to persuade us not to ask too many questions and just go with it. (One night of nookie and the guy’s ready to risk life, limb and the law to save this woman? Okey doke.) And thankfully all the stab wounds, bullet wounds, third-degree burns, contusions, bruises, impalements, broken bones and hangnails don’t occur in brains or livers or other vital areas as Nate squashes his introverted self and summons the self that’s capable of doing horrible, horrible things to horrible, horrible people in the name of luurrve. 

That’s a pretty steep arc, but Quaid and Midthunder cultivate enough chemistry in early scenes to put it in the ballpark of near-plausible character motivation. All right, it’s not plausible at all, but if Nate doesn’t follow through on Sherry’s declaration – “You’re like a superhero!” she coos before they have sex, which is exactly the kind of thing you say to a guy you want to have sex with – then we don’t have much of a movie here. Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (Significant Other) stage some slick action sequences and maintain a snappy pace, while screenwriter Lars Jacobson sprinkles the mayhem with enough crunchy one-liners to keep us chuckling. 

It’s worth noting that this movie, as you may expect, ramps up the violence for a particularly grisly conclusion that made me think of not just RoboCop, but RoboCop: The Director’s Cut. There were also moments where I wondered if the primary bad guy also doesn’t feel pain, considering how much punishment he endures. You’ve been warned, and that warning includes a heads-up that the film’s rom-com charms and average-guy-loses-his-god-damn-shit gimmickry wear off a bit as the violence escalates and the tone shifts from sweet to silly to darkly comic. But by then, we’re committed to seeing it through, if only to see how much Novocaine tests the limits of Movie CIPA before we lose our lunches.

Our Call: Novocaine is genial enough in its extreme violence to endear audiences with the capacity to endure it. It goes from fun to sicko fun. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.