If you are looking for reasons to discourage nepotism in the entertainment industry, look no more. Novocaine, a purported hill of hilarity that falls flat on its farcical face, features two star-kids: Jack Quaid who plays the painless lead, is the son of Dennis Qaid and Meg Ryan, while Ray Nicholson who plays the villain, is Jack Nicholson’s son.
Alas, neither possesses any of his illustrious parents’ charm screen presence, or talent. This may be the reason why they have gone the goofy way. You know, when facing the odds, do an oddball. That kind of a thing.
Sadly the intended chuckles get a hard knock on the knuckles by the weak writing and the even weaker execution of the plot. Not one joke lands without mishap. It is like creating a conscious chaos and hoping that something would come of it. All that emerges from the chaos…is chaos.
The protagonist Nathan suffers from a rare condition that doesn’t allow him to feel any pain. Vasan Bala got there first in Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota. While watching painless Nathan (played painfully by Qaid), cruelly called Novocaine in his school days, you would wish you could also have some of the same, to skip the pain of watching this film.
Nathan meets Sherry (Amber Midthunder). They both work in a bank. They like each other. They bond. Why? Because there is a bank robbery and Sherry is taken hostage.
Then begins the royal chase to get Sherry back. To get the derailed plot back? No one cares. This is a funny-farm flick where everyone hopes that something would come out of the chaos. But the deeper it goes into the plot, the messier it gets. The fights look like they have been staged without a choreographer. Weapons of injury include pots and pans, barbs and jibes which somehow never hit target.
One of the big “jokes” has Nathan hanging upside down and being tortured. He pretends to be hurting when we know-and the villain doesn’t—that Nathan can’t feel any pain.
Don’t know which is worse: Nathan pretending to feel pain, or the actor Jack Qaid pretending to play someone who can’t feel pain. Making matters worse is the nuptial lighting of the action sequences: I couldn’t tell who was hitting whom. Of course, the hardest hit is us the audience. Every punchline in this punchdrunk laughraiser misses its target. Novocaine is meant to be funny, goofy and fun. Sadly, it is none.
