Nate At The Movies

Thanks to a perfectly timed showing at my Regal theater, I bought my ticket to Novocaine on my way home and was fully expecting to be in the theater by myself on a Monday afternoon. There was a grand total of two people (myself included) in the theater today, and though Novocaine has actually been doing okay financially, the product matched the crowd.

I wasn’t ever bored by Novocaine—its concept was pretty interesting in theory and had a lot of potential for fun action scenes—but its inconsistency in execution was frustrating. The story certainly allowed for Jack Quaid to get into some precarious situations and use his sort-of superpower to beat up on some bad guys, but I actually felt like the script didn’t lean into that enough. They took their time getting to that action, too; I didn’t buy a ticket to see a Jack Quaid office love story! When the script did embrace the action, the movie excelled, and there were some really creative and satisfying kills. There were some moments that the film shied away from the conventional action-comedy beats, too, shamelessly killing people that I wouldn’t usually expect to die in those moments. I was a fan of those surprises.

I also enjoyed the comedy, but the script didn’t prioritize humor nearly as much as it should have. Jack Quaid and Jacob Batalon should’ve had more moments to bounce off each other comedically, but they weren’t afforded those (likely because Batalon’s character didn’t show up on-screen until well past halfway through its runtime). Novocaine had a larger problem of character development—Nate was the only person who wasn’t one-dimensional or frustratingly underwritten—which seems to be a trend in the 2025 action movies I’ve seen (looking at you, Love Hurts).

There were some truly high moments in Novocaine—usually when the script leaned into the fun and action with the creative cinematography to match—but struggled far too much with inconsistency and flimsy writing. There was a great film somewhere in Novocaine, but they just didn’t quite put it together this time.