Lots of Pain, MInimal Gain
The latest addition to the ‘OMA’ sub-genre tries hard to find a novel angle and almost gets there.
Novocaine
Directors: Dan Berk, Robert Olsen • Writer: Lars Jacobson
Starring: Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Betty Gabriel, Ray Nicholson, Jacob Batalon
USA • 1hr 50mins
Opens Hong Kong Mar 13 • IIB
Grade: B-
Oh my god, what hath Taken and John Wick wrought up these lands? Ever since Liam Neeson and Keanu Reeves juiced their careers in those one-man wrecking crew, or One Man Army, movies we’ve been inundated with unassuming, sometimes older (that would be in the Geriaction sub-genre) gentlemen on a solitary mission to fuck up everyone’s shit while they go on some kind of righteous crusade. Neeson was after his kidnapped daughter, Reeves was avenging his murdered puppy (yes!).
Without even Googling, literal John Wick knock-off Nobody (produced by the Wick folks), Peppermint – with a girl! – Kill from India (which takes place on a train), the recent gawdawful Love Hurts, Atomic Blonde – more girls! – Boy Kills World, Monkey Man, John Wick spin-off in Ballerina, coming in June … you get the idea. These all spring to mind. And no, it’s not a new trend (yo, Commando, Death Wish), but man it’s picked up steam of late, and there’s a stronger sense of loner motivation to the new crew. Tequila in Hard Boiled kind of fits this bill but he works within a larger machine for a greater good. Same for John McLane in Die Hard. The new breed is singularly isolated from everyone around them, uninterested in the rigid legal or moral structures of a police department (hahahaha) or assassin’s code – and they’re single-minded in their purpose. And as a sub-genre it already needs a serious shot of creativity.
No pie ever? Wrong!
As I have made crystal clear, Jack Quaid sorta kinda irritates me. He’s in the early Hugh Grant stage of his career for me. Grant did that flustered, vaguely charming Queen’s English Englishman for several years and got on my very last nerve. He’s doing better now. Quaid is in his vaguely charming, bumbling Everydude phase and it’s getting tired. Huey on The Boys and Boimler on Lower Decks are the same performance and it’s exhausting. Credit to him for breaking from the pattern with Companion. Novocaine falls somewhere in the middle of this Venn diagram.
Quaid is Nathan Caine, a loan officer at a small bank in San Diego (played here by Cape Town) with a rare genetic disorder that makes him entirely insensitive to physical pain (and yup, congenital insensitivity to pain, CIP, is a real thing). He’s extremely sheltered and has never had a real life. He eats all his food through a straw so that he doesn’t risk biting his tongue off without knowing it. He’s never had pie. He has an alarm on his smartwatch for bathroom breaks; better safe than sorry. But he’s a decent guy who bends the rules to help a pensioner keep his shop. When the new girl at the bank, Sherry (Amber Midthunder, so awesome in Prey), takes a bizarre interest in Nathan, he’s thrilled and a little terrified. Their courtship is put on hold when a crew of bank robbers makes off with a pile of cash one morning – Nathan opens the vault – and takes Sherry hostage. Of course he goes after her, leveraging his only friend, fellow online gamer Roscoe (Jacob Batalon, Ned in the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies) for help while being pursued by suspicious detective Mincy Langston (Betty Gabriel, Get Out).
Novocaine is one of those action movies, like thousands before it, where internal logic goes out the window almost immediately in order to keep the plot moving forward. Writer Lars Jacobson has one feature credit to his name, the grim Day of the Dead: Bloodline, and Novocaine isn’t a huge leap, but the film starts strong before going off a cliff right into predictable, violent inanity. A desk drone finds the stones to chase after the girl he’s gone out with a whole one time when she’s scooped up by murderous thieves? Sure. This drone drives around the city with incriminating evidence in the thieves’ car? Of course he does. And he becomes a total badass? Uh… okay I’ll go with it. Everyone turns on a dime and becomes a different person out of absolutely nowhere? Naturally.
That kind of sloppiness is to be expected in some ways. It doesn’t make it right but there it is. So hat’s off to Jacobson and co-directors (it took two guys to make this?) Dan Berk and Robert Olsen for their utter commitment to Novocaine’s increasingly bonkers kills and maimings – highlights include a medieval mace, deep fryer oil and a defibrillator – and, freaky as it may seem, Nathan and Sherry’s sweet romance. Her defence of Nathan’s honour in a bar when an old school bully shows up to explain the Novocaine nickname earns a fist pump. There are a couple of twists (veterans of this kind of filmmaking will not be surprised in the least), the one-liners that land, land hard and the hero’s imperviousness to pain is novel. You could do much, much worse for a goofy OMA action fix – like Love Hurts (someone get Ariana DeBose a new agent) – but ultimately Berk and Olsen don’t bring much new to the table with the exception of Mincy pointing out Nathan’s rampage was in fact illegal and he should be looking at hard time. But pointing out the nonsense doesn’t forgive it. Cinemasins is going to have a field day with this.