By Sandra Hall
NOVOCAINE NO PAIN
★
MA, 110 minutes. In cinemas April 3
To be fair, it’s possible that Novocaine No Pain was designed as a satire on the amount of violence in movies. After all, it’s billed as a comedy but the joke goes missing in the first few minutes amid the volume of blood splashed around on the screen.
Jack Quaid in Novocaine No Pain.Credit: Marcos Cruz
The beleaguered hero, Nathan Caine – played by Jack Quaid, son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid – suffers from a congenital insensitivity to pain, a disease so serious in real life that the whole film and its excruciating overdose of slapstick violence could be viewed as an act of gross insensitivity towards those who suffer from the condition.
When the film opens, things are looking too good to last for good-natured Nathan, who has a steady job as an assistant bank manager. He has a crush on Sherry (Amber Midthunder), one of his workmates, and she gives every sign of feeling the same way about him. For the first time in his life, the boy who was nicknamed Novocaine at school is beginning to feel normal. Then the bank is robbed by a gang who take great delight in killing the manager and anyone else in firing range. Sherry is taken hostage and mild-mannered Nathan is instantly transformed into a cack-handed Action Man.
He steals a police car and a gun which he doesn’t know how to use and heads off in pursuit of the robbers. The film then turns into a grotesquely unbelievable demonstration of the infinite number of ways in which a human body could be beaten, burnt, punctured and otherwise mangled while continuing to live.
There are three bank robbers and Nathan has a protracted encounter with each in turn after first facing up to one of their confederates, a hulking tattoo artist whose indifference to pain rivals his own. He himself has sustained quite a lot of damage by this time and if he wasn’t feeling it, I was, thanks to the explicit level of detail that the directors, Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, scrupulously provide. They also introduce a variety of weapons. As well as the tattoo parlour, with its inks and needles, we stop off at a restaurant kitchen where Nathan and his opponent make inventive use of hot frying pans, vats of oil and carving knives. Then it’s on to a house which has been booby trapped by its owner, one of the thieves, against the possibility of intruders. It’s here that Nathan’s thigh meets an arrow from a crossbow just before he’s jerked skyward by an unseen pulley and finds himself hanging from the ceiling.
The sadistic ingenuity which goes into all this verges on torture porn and is all the more unnerving because it’s meant to be funny. Many movies offend by laying on the violence while glossing over the consequences but here we have the opposite effect as the camera gleefully dwells on each wound in grisly close-up.
Ironically, Quaid is a likeable actor. Initially, he displays enough charm to suggest that the film might have worked as the rom-com it’s pretending to be in its early scenes. But that would have meant hiring a writer with a light touch and a talent for dialogue. Too hard. Much easier to sell a macabre gimmick with novelty on its side and turn rom-com into horror movie.
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