About a Boy (or Pain and Gain)
If you’ve ever wondered what typecasting is, I give to you Jack Quaid. Quaid is one of the stars of Amazon Prime’s series The Boys. In The Boys, Quaid plays a nerdy, lovesick man putting himself in harm’s way for the girl he loves. He’s affable, well-meaning, and even gets superpowers for a short time. In the new movie Novocaine, Quaid stars as Nate Caine, a nerdy, affable, well-meaning, lovesick man putting himself in harm’s way for the girl he loves. Nate even has a quasi-superpower – congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA). In layman’s terms, he can’t feel pain. CIPA is actually a real and extremely rare genetic disorder, though I’m not sure anyone afflicted by CIPA has thought about a life fighting crime.
Nate is an assistant manager at a bank and has child-proofed his entire life. Tennis balls covering desk corners, putty covering pencil tips, and a little do-it-yourself stopper on his shower handle to prevent the water from becoming too hot, and eating nothing but pureed food smoothies to avoid potentially biting through and swallowing his own tongue. He can still play computer games in his spare time though, so he’s doing juuuust fine in life.
Nate’s life becomes a whole lot more dangerous when two things happen. The first is his crush, a bank teller named Sherry (Amber Midthunder), asks him out on a date, which he nervously accepts. After Nate describes his condition to her, she convinces him to try a bite of cherry pie (subtle, no?), then takes him back to his place to find out if he can feel sensations other than pain, if you know what I mean (subtle, no?).
The second thing that happens is Nate’s bank gets robbed and Sherry is kidnapped by the bandits. After a bunch of cops are gunned down by the bad guys, Nate determines that Sherry is his only hope. After strapping a tourniquet on a bleeding cop, he grabs the cop’s gun and car and takes off after the fleeing robbers. At this point, the question isn’t what injuries will happen to Nate, but what injuries won’t happen to Nate?
The beauty of the can’t-feel-pain concept is it allows us to suspend our disbelief that Nate can keep going whenever he takes a hit. All of us have been annoyed during one action movie or another where characters endure injuries that would incapacitate them in reality, but which barely slow them down in the film. Take John Wick, for example, who can be shot multiple times, thrown down two hundred feet of concrete stairs, and fall from multiple stories onto parked cars with barely more than a scrape and still at 100% fighting strength. With Nate, we accept why he can keep going as the injuries stack up, cringe at the damage being done to him, and laugh at the jokes that come with that damage. Yes, it’s okay to laugh, that’s part of the fun of this movie.
Even better is that the filmmakers (written by Lars Jacobson and directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen) don’t let the entire movie just turn into a funhouse of doom that Nate must survive. To be fair, there is a scene where Nate must navigate and survive a literal house filled with booby traps. How else are they going to fit a crossbow and medieval mace into this movie? But after Nate chases down and fights the first of the three bad guys immediately after the bank heist, Nate has to track down where the other two have taken Sherry. This slows the movie down between the action scenes, allowing both Nate and the audience to catch their breath and Nate to patch up his wounds.
While some viewers may tire of the conveyor belt of injuries, the film does a really good job of not going completely overboard with them. The film doesn’t go full Deadpool or Wolverine by chopping off Nate’s body parts, though it does toe the line occasionally. But when it does, it’s usually to wring comedy out of it, like when Nate pretends to be in pain while being tortured by a bad guy, or to induce a collective cringe from the audience. I won’t spoil any of those for you, but if you’ve seen The Boys, it’s like that but without the sexual stuff.
Overall, I really enjoyed the film. The pacing is good, the practical effects and stunts are great, the plot is simple without being rote, and the actors are all game for making this thing work. The only criticism I have is the film is being partially distributed in 4DX theaters. What’s 4DX, you ask? Great question. I didn’t know either until my seat punched me in the kidney. That is not an exaggeration. The first time Nate gets punched, I thought the person behind me kicked my seat. Then it happened again and realization dawned on me. The whole movie was going to be like that. The seats (connected on platforms in sets of four) gyrated and shook around like a carnival ride. All this while fans blew air in our faces from our seats and from large fans attached to the walls. Thankfully, the water sprayers in the seats were unneeded for this particular movie (or they were dry). While the 4DX was a little fun at first, the novelty quickly wore off and the ride just became distracting. At one point, I legitimately wondered if I needed a lap belt and if a small speaker in my seat was going to advise me to keep my arms and legs inside the ride vehicle at all times. Unlike Nate, if my seat ejected me, I’d feel some pain.
Rating: Don’t ask for any money back unless the seats made you spill your concessions.
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