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In Novocaine No Pain (title used in Australia only while the rest of the world has the brief and more effective Novocaine) Jack Quaid plays an everyday man called Nate Caine. He’s a dedicated assistant manager in a bank who suffers from a degenerative condition where he cannot feel pain. He can still die and break his bones, but I guess pain is part of the journey.

Poor Nate’s life is impaired by his condition. He can’t eat solid foods in case he accidentally bites his tongue and bleeds to death. He doesn’t go out and have fun, and instead spends his time off playing online videogames with his only friend Roscoe (Jacob Batalon).

That is until he meets Sherry (Amber Midhunter, in an unexpected career turn after turning heads as an action star in the incredible Prey), a cashier at Nate’s bank who embraces his issue, elevates it even (“you’re like a superhero”), protects him from bullies, and makes every advance to spend the night together.

Expectedly something happens to her – the following day a gang of criminals rob their bank and take Sherry as a hostage. Nate somehow doesn’t trust the police to find Sherry on time and decides to take the rescue into his own hands – every punch in the face, every kick in the groin, every bullet, every vat of boiling oil, every trapdoor. Nate can take it all.

It’s a cool idea reminiscent of those high-concept action movie from the 2000s like Crank or Shoot’Em Up, that film where Clive Owen is a stoic killer who murders people with a carrot and defeats an entire S.W.A.T. team while having sex with Monica Bellucci.

Quaid works as an action star because he has this normal guy demeanour that is incredibly satisfying to see taking a beating from giant beast. You can see directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen are having fun with the concept, finding increasingly contrived ideas for Nate to be involved in. There are all these cartoonish situations that wouldn’t be part of any kind of action film, but Berk and Olsen slot them in just so we can see Nate take a beating. The best one is Nate investigating the home of one of the robbers who is a paranoid prepper and boobie-trapped his entire house, Home Alone-style. Because if your character can’t feel pain, you’re going to have to throw every arrow and flail at him.

Novocaine No Pain (I’ll never get used to this completely redundant title) is structured and paced with gusto but offers little above that. It commits the most egregious sin an action movie can make – proudly being as apolotical and unmetaphorical as it can be. The quintessential “just turn off your brain and enjoy it”, which is superfluous because if I’m turning-off my brain, why am I wasting my time and money watching something I’m not even equipped to remember, let alone emotionally connect with?

I don’t hate it because there’s nothing to hate. There’s nothing in it all. It’s a film with fun action scenes, like every other fun action out there. You’d think making Nate a banker would have some repercussion about his morals and teach him a lesson about the value of humanity, but the film only wants him there so the robbers can come – he’s actually a nice banker who extends deadlines so his clients facing bankruptcy and foreclosure can have more time to fix their lives. The bank robbers could have something to say about the desperation of Americans in an unforgiving economic system. Nate’s isolation could be a way to talk about male insecurity and toxicity when facing the outside world. Even the mere idea of having sex is complicated because he thinks being with a woman can hurt him (there, double entendre). No, none of that. Novocaine No Pain (urgh) develops zero ideas beyond building up to a physical gag.

The Serbian philosopher Slavoj Žižek once said his favourite product is Diet Coke with no caffeine. It is a product with no nutritional value, no taste or energy from the caffeine, no release from the sugar. It perfectly encapsulates consumption in capitalism as the pursuit for the idea, now recreated by an artificial substance that that barely resembles the real thing. It’s nothing more than a promise. Novocaine No Pain (that’s it, last time I’m writing this title) is the Diet Coke with no caffeine of action movies.

Verdict: 2.5 out of 5
For fans of action movies who are dying for those cartoonish high-concept films that go straight to the point. This is all bones, no filler.  Also no meat, and the bones are brittle, but the whole thing stands up on its own.