In Dan Berk and Robert Olsen's Novocaine, a crew of gun-toting Bad Santas interrupts a budding workplace romance in a San Diego bank. When these festively costumed robbers take off with duffel bags full of cash, and the beautiful teller Sherry (Amber Midthunder) as their hostage, her smitten and delusional assistant manager Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) chases after his dream girl in a stolen police cruiser.
It's a classic setup for a vigilante rescue, but there is, of course, a catch: Nathan Caine can't feel pain. He suffers from the rare and debilitating condition known by the acronym CIPA (congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis), which makes everyday life a veritable minefield of potential injuries gone disastrously unnoticed and carries with it an average life expectancy of 25 years.
The sweet and screwy Sherry totally upended his necessarily sheltered existence of cushioned corners and blended meals, forcing him out of his comfort zone and opening his eyes to adventure and possibility before being abruptly whisked away.
The efforts made by Lars Jacobson's screenplay to establish emotional stakes between the two teeter on the verge of endearingly corny and outright cringe-inducing; Nathan's unfinished torso-spanning tattoo — likened to a story without an ending — finds a thudding parallel with Sherry's self-inflicted scars, and the pair trauma bond in a way that's both calculating and wildly misjudged.
In her absence, the film makes briskly and brutally clear that Nathan's physical insensitivity now serves as an asset instead of a hindrance. A kitchen-set melée battle climaxes with him reaching into a fryer to retrieve his pistol, for example — the first of many disastrous injuries that Novocaine has in store for its protagonist.
In a genre dependent on its characters' ability to weather the physically impossible, this is the kind of gimmick that can carry a timeworn premise to refreshing heights, but over the course of their film's nearly two-hour runtime, Berk and Olsen lose their grasp on whatever novelty and excitement their hook managed to latch onto. The script works overtime to contrive clever but redundant setpieces of ironic bludgeoning (and bludgeoning irony), with Quaid's committed physical performance eventually disappearing into the plot's pedestrian machinery.
A grating Jacob Batalon enters the fray as a reluctant sidekick, two lazy and lumbering cops (Betty Gabriel and Matt Walsh) half-heartedly pursue our would-be action hero, and the robbers' head honcho Simon (Ray Nicholson) verbally spars with Sherry as he waits for his lackeys to return to their rendezvous point. Nicholson, another nepo baby with a striking resemblance to the industry royalty he sprang from, turns in a lazy pantomime of psychopathy (a thin foil to Nathan's physical condition) that fares far worse in comparison to his co-star. Without a compelling point of opposition to Quaid's antics, the film is left off-balance, treading water with one hand behind its back.
Novocaine isn't particularly interested in exploring — or even fully committing to — Nathan's own evident derangement, which leads him into one tight corner after another. Instead, it settles for a juvenile fantasy of male actualization, made all the more suspect for the winking awareness it exhibits in that indulgence. It's a flimsy yet savvily fungible excuse for spectacular violence devoid of any real consequences — an idea masquerading as a movie.