‘Novocaine’ Review: The Jack Quaid Action Rom-Com Tries To Balance Pain & Pleasure

As they say, with pain comes pleasure. One can only then assume that without pain comes no pleasure. Novocaine, the new action rom-com movie in which Jack Quaid must use his rare medical condition of feeling no pain to his advantage in order to save his new girlfriend from the grips of some bank burglars, puts both of those statements to the test, offering competing highlights and lowlights during its runtime.

‘Novocaine’ Runs on a Fairly Novel Premise

The idea of Novocaine is actually pretty cool: A guy who can’t feel any pain and is afraid to eat any solid food — especially cherry pie — for fear of biting off his tongue must go from meek Assistant Manager at a San Diego bank to life-saving hero in which he uses his fear to his advantage. I mean, yeah, pretty cool.

And there’s something to be said thematically here. This something, that isn’t lost on the movie especially considering it dedicates a whole scene to spelling it out, is that we are all longing for that one person to bring out our brightest and most brave self. Once Quaid’s character Nate pursues pleasure and realizes he has a romantic spark with Sherry (Amber Midthunder), an employee at his bank, he is able to find that person who helps him see life with more pizazz.

The connection quickly blossoms during a night out at an art show, proceeding to the foreseeable next steps of putting a label on their relationship. Just as Nate walks across the bank to express such intentions to Sherry, things get painful. The bank is robbed, Sherry is taken hostage, and Nate must take matters into his own hands to regain the presence of the person who has finally helped him ditch the stereotypes of a “lonesome middle-aged white guy” (yep, he plays on the computer every night as he converses with his friend, portrayed quite hilariously by Jacob Batalon, whom he has never met in person).

Jack Quaid and Jacob Batalon Have Great Chemistry

There’s action and humor galore in this movie. And not just regular old action sequences either. I’m talking about truly painful, brutal action sequences that make for some pretty fun moments in which Quaid is able to display his The Boys-esque energy in a full-fledged film. However, the Zack Snyder school of slo-mo comes out to play a little too often, and the score — quite annoyingly more times than not — tells you exactly when a powerful punch or searing strike lands.

For what it’s worth, Novocaine is rated R and takes advantage of that rating when it comes to the bloody encounters littered from start to end. I couldn’t help but think of 2024’s Monkey Man during a specific scene that takes place in a kitchen, for both better and worse. The biggest issue with the use of the action is that it all falls within rather trite tropes and storyline points that are pretty easy to predict.

Fused with comedy that, admittedly, I felt was more miss than hit, the combination does present some genuinely exciting moments. The “playful pal’s” energy that Quaid and Batalon capture made me want to see them in a slick, profane-ridden adult buddy-comedy with a tight 90-minute runtime; their engaging back-and-forth is both believable and amusing but gets a bit ground down and overshadowed by the focus on tough action time and time again. It’s perplexing that Matt Walsh, who isn’t in more than two or three scenes, delivers the most successful one-liners of the entire movie. It doesn’t take away from what Quaid and Batalon are able to produce, but it’s a curious case nonetheless.

‘Novocaine’ Is a Perfectly Serviceable Popcorn Flick

Novocaine isn’t bad by any means — it’s a perfectly serviceable popcorn flick — but, unfortunately, it isn’t much more than that. The film has thematic relevance that it wants to explore, and when it takes itself too seriously, it falters. It works best as a silly “go-save-the-girl” journey, even if it contains one too many twists and a daintily built love connection between the leads.

So what was that saying? With pain comes pleasure? And without pain shall come no pleasure? Well, it turns out that you can actually have a little bit of both and the sliding scale of pain and pleasure can offer something for everyone. Novocaine may possess a main character who can’t feel pain, but that doesn’t mean you, as the audience member, won’t feel it. And, conversely, pleasure can be found in pain, if even in the smallest glimpses.