Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) can’t feel pain, but audiences will while watching Novocaine, a misfire that never strikes the right balance between comedy and carnage.
The story of a man with a rare genetic condition that makes him impervious to suffering who finds himself thrust into rescue-mission mode when his beloved is kidnapped, Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s feature operates in a similar vein to Bob Odenkirk’s Nobody and Ke Huy Quan’s recent Love Hurts. That is to say that the film strives for laughs and thrills by putting an everyman through the brutal ringer. Yet in trying to have it both ways, it succeeds in neither, in the process stranding its charming leading man in a saga that needed to be either goofier or more gruesome.
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