Film Review - Novocaine (2025)

Novocaine stars Jack Quaid as Nathan Caine, an Assistant Manager in a San Diego bank who has a rare genetic disorder where he can literally feel no pain but he manages to fall in love with one of the girls Sherry (Amber Midthunder) who works at the bank but one day the Bank is robbed an Sherry is kidnapped so Nathan has to put his “I feel no pain” disability to good use to rescue her.

Novocaine is definitely one of my favourite films of 2025 so far and the first reason why is due to the unique storytelling concept of the film, sure you’ve had characters like Wolverine in the X-Men where they heal up after getting injured but Nathan isn’t like that this is a real disability he has and for better or worse he has to use it to his advantage to get the girl back and it makes for some very fun action scenes that make good use of his condition and the restricted rating the film has.

Secondly is Jack Quaid and this is the performance that should make him a movie star, at times you can see the sweetness from his mother Meg Ryan in his eyes and his smile while also being able to be sarcastic like his father Dennis Quaid could be in some of his roles and watching him here do these crazy action scenes while also being a romantic lead was very effective and he has good chemistry with Midthunder.

Speaking of Midthunder (who we first saw in 2022’s Predator film Prey) she is very good here as well and I really enjoyed seeing her again after she was memorable in that film as well and I really enjoyed her scenes with Quaid hopefully they get a crack at a proper rom com together some day.

But there are a couple of problems I have with this movie and first of those is the villains, don’t get me wrong their perfectly serviceable but I wish they were more memorable like you saw in movies like Die Hard or the Indiana Jones films or the best of the James Bond films but that has been a long documented failing on my part and Ray Nicholson is perfectly solid as the main bad guy Simon but he isn’t as memorable as he could’ve been.

And secondly I wish that the disability aspect of Nathan’s character had been played up more in the first act before he meets Sherry, sure he tells her about some of the pluses and minuses of his condition but I wish we saw more of it before Sherry comes into his life and accepts him for who he is and not some ideal version of what he could be as the brief scenes we did get really appealed to me and I wish we saw more of them.

That said however Novocaine is great fun, 3 and a half out of 5.