We’re in the thick of an ongoing movie star crisis and it’s one that no amount of “Glen Powell grinning on a red carpet” images can easily fix. His rise might have been a rare spot of good news on that front but it’s otherwise been a rough period for the emergence of true, crowd-drawing leads, a problem across many genres that’s recently been felt most in the action sphere. The last year has seen Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Henry Cavill, Bill Skarsgård, Dev Patel and, last month, Ke Huy Quan face a mixture of critical shrugs and audience lack of interest (Love Hurts in particular, bombing with $15m globally and an 18% RT rating) while those more established, such as Gerard Butler, Keanu Reeves and Jason Statham, have continued to dominate.
Ahead of Ana de Armas and Rami Malek trying their luck, here comes nepo baby done good Jack Quaid in Novocaine, the son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid fresh off the patchy sci-fi comedy Companion. That film saw him riff on his Scream persona – toxic bro doing nice guy cosplay – while here he’s closer to Amazon’s The Boys – nerdy guy doing action hero cosplay – and, again, he’s better than the material. But his charm still isn’t enough to power us through another quippy and egregiously thin little lark, hinged on a one-joke premise that stops being funny far too soon.
The joke here is that the junior bank manager Nathan Caine (Quaid) can’t feel pain. He has a rare disorder that has turned his small life even smaller, shying away from everyday life with the adoption of a tightly controlled routine to avoid serious injury. For reasons known only by the screenwriter, he’s tempted to change that after loosely working with the teller Sherry (Prey’s Amber Midthunder), who gets him to do things like eat solid food (he’s been on a liquid diet to avoid biting his tongue off) and risk his life for her during a robbery. She’s taken hostage by a crew of Santa suit-dressed criminals (the film is half-heartedly set at Christmas) so he decides to track them down and save the girl.
Such recklessness from someone who has curated the cushioned life of a solitary introvert would need more motivation than the shreds we’re given here. A diner lunch, some drinks and a night in bed, all tied together with the vaguest hint of chemistry, are not enough to warrant a death-defying act of romance, his insertion into the crime then serving to implicate him. While his inability to feel pain might act as a superpower in the right moment, we’re never really shown why he would also be such a nifty fighter. It’s all the stuff of basic male fantasy – a lanky video game-playing geek is actually a secret action star – and while the film isn’t purporting to be a grounded slice-of-life drama, there are too many leaps required.
There’s also not really enough fun here, the repetitive nature of the fight scenes – quip, laugh, injury, wince – growing tired fast. There’s such glee over the violence that it takes precedence over any genuine excitement, the directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen shooting the action with such drab flatness that our pulses never quicken. The neo-noir marketing campaign and the smartass script would lead one to expect something visually sharper but there’s no discernible style here, the duo weirdly choosing to emulate the feel of a bigger Michael Bay-esque action thriller rather than something more suited to the offbeat material and small budget (it’s also shot in Cape Town, a hugely unconvincing double for San Diego).
After exhausting its elevator pitch premise, the script, from Lars Jacobson, doesn’t have much more to offer. The plotting of the heist is filled with distracting “but how come” holes and while there’s a decent-ish twist early on, it’s then just one long unexciting chase to the end, a boringly straight line when some left turns would help. Quaid’s charm is diluted by dialogue that’s never quite as funny as it should be or those involved think it is and as his zippy gamer sidekick, Jacob Batalon, finds himself in autopilot territory that as an actor he seems unable to escape (he’s trapped in a cycle of regurgitating lesser versions of his Spider-Man role). It’s clear that this is being primed as a cheap and cheerful new B franchise but with the premise exhausted so very fast, it’ll be a struggle to find that much more to do with such a lacklustre character with such a played-out condition. Novocaine urges us to feel something big – excitement, revulsion, romance, shock, amusement – but I left feeling very little.
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Novocaine is out in US cinemas on 14 March, the UK on 28 March and Australia on 3 April
Source: theguardian.com
