Novocaine

Back in March, I traveled an hour each way to see this movie. It features Jack Quaid – Dennis' son, star of TV's The Boys and the voice of Boimler on Star Trek: Lower Decks – as Nate Caine, a 30-year-old guy who has already outlived his life expectancy of 25 years due to a condition that makes him insensitive to pain. How has he done it? By living a very careful life. He never eats solid food, for fear of biting his tongue off. He sets an alarm on his wristwatch to remind him to pee every three hours, lest his bladder explode. He rounds off the corners of his desk with cut-open tennis balls and sticks little caps on the tips of sharpened pencils, not to protect them but to protect him.

Then, one day after he's opened himself up to a woman for the first time – a co-worker at the bank where he's the assistant manager – a trio of killer bank robbers takes Sherry hostage and, throwing caution to the wind, Nate goes after her. What follows is an almost non-stop comic action-fest with no holds barred, in the sense of the phrase only possible when there's a guy with no sense of pain involved and he doesn't care what happens to him. What the bad guys do to him and what he does to them is at the limit of gross-outitude that I could bear. Visualize me, clawing at my face, wanting to cover my eyes but struggling not to. You get what I'm saying. The movie has some terrific character beats, plot twists that make you rethink everything, and of course, insane fight scenes.

I loved Jack Quaid's performance in this movie. He was the perfect actor for the role – a super nice guy, with the type of uncertain, vulnerable mildness that goes surprisingly well with ape-kaka craziness and extreme violence. He has good comic timing, an expressively mugging face and a way of chewing on a piece of pie that keeps me wondering whether he's actually going to chew his tongue off. Working with him are Amber Midthunder from the CW's Roswell, Jack Nicholson's son Ray Nicholson (Smile 2), Jacob Balaton (Tom Holland-Spidey's sidekick), Betty Gabriel (Get Out), and a number of other folks whose names I can't place but who were solid in this film.

Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) The moment when you realize a certain character isn't on the side you think they are. It's hard to describe this moment without spoiling it, but when it happened, I could swear I heard someone in the audience gasp ... yet later, when I turned to look behind me, I discovered that I was alone in the theater. So, either that place is haunted or the gasp came out of me and I didn't know it. (Full disclosure, I had a sense that someone was sitting behind me through most of the movie. Maybe they left before I looked around?)

(2) Nate's fight with the first of the two brothers on the bank robber team, in a restaurant kitchen. What made it a scene that made the movie for me is not so much the scenery-wrecking action or the self-immolating step Nate takes to gain the upper hand, as the genuine effort he makes throughout the fight to reason with the bad guy and just talk things out. It is such an epitome of his character and what makes Quaid perfect for this role.

(3) The final scene, which thanks to photography lacking in depth of focus could be playing out in a restaurant ... until Nate opens his shirt to flash his chest tattoo, and the guard across the room warns him against public displays of affection. Yup, somebody's in jail at the end, and somebody else is waiting for them to get out, which is a funny way to end a romantic comedy – perhaps in more than one sense of the word "funny" – and yet it's a happy ending of what, had the box office numbers been higher, might have been the beginning of a very entertaining franchise. But whatever. I encourage you to give this movie a shot.