Novocaine

Jack Quaid has spent the past few years playing guys you root for, from Hughie in The Boys to the hapless hero of Companion. In Novocaine, he plays Nate Caine, a bank assistant manager with congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis, a real genetic disorder that means he cannot feel physical pain or regulate his body temperature. That condition turns him into an unlikely action hero when his coworker and crush, Sherry (Amber Midthunder), is taken hostage during a robbery.

Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, the duo behind Villains, keep the tone loose and the violence cartoonishly brutal. Nate takes beatings, stabbings, and worse without flinching, and the comedy comes from the gap between his gentle, awkward personality and the punishment he absorbs. Ray Nicholson plays the villain Simon, while Betty Gabriel, Matt Walsh, and Jacob Batalon fill out the supporting cast. Lars Jacobson wrote the script.

Paramount released the film on March 14, 2025, after a March 3 premiere. It cost a reported $18 million and grossed about $34.5 million worldwide, a modest return that still roughly doubled its budget. Critics were mixed but mostly charmed, praising Quaid's likability and the clever premise while noting the formulaic script. It is not trying to reinvent the genre. It is trying to be a fun, brisk ride, and on that score it mostly works. [edit]

Nate Caine lives a quiet, carefully managed life in a small American town. He works as an assistant manager at a local bank, keeps to himself, and has learned to compensate for a rare genetic condition called CIPA, congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis. He cannot feel physical pain, and his body struggles to regulate temperature. That means he has to check himself constantly for injuries he would not otherwise notice. A cut, a burn, a broken bone could go untreated for hours. So Nate plays it safe. He avoids risk. He has built a life around caution.

Then Sherry starts working at the bank. She is warm, funny, and easy to talk to, and Nate falls hard. The film's marketing tagline, "Mad About the Girl," sums up his motivation. For the first time in a long while, Nate has something to lose. Their workplace romance is tentative and sweet, the kind of tentative, sweet thing that makes a person start thinking about the future.

That future gets shattered when a crew of masked robbers storms the bank. The heist goes wrong, and Sherry is taken hostage. Police set up a perimeter. Negotiators arrive. Everyone settles in for the slow, tense work of a hostage crisis. Nate does not settle in. He cannot feel fear the way other people do, and he certainly cannot be stopped by pain. So he walks straight into the danger.

What follows is a series of set pieces in which Nate pushes deeper into the robbers' world, taking escalating damage and refusing to stop. A normal person would recoil from gunfire, blades, and beatings. Nate simply keeps going. His condition becomes a strange kind of armor, and the film mines dark comedy from the contrast between his gentle, golden-retriever personality and the brutality he endures and inflicts.

The robbers are led by Simon (Ray Nicholson), a menacing figure who is far more dangerous and organized than a simple bank job would suggest. As Nate works his way closer to Sherry, he crosses paths with police detective Mincy (Betty Gabriel), who is trying to manage the crisis, and bank figure Coltraine (Matt Walsh), who gets caught up in the chaos. His coworker and friend Roscoe (Jacob Batalon) also gets pulled into the mess. The crew includes Andre (Conrad Kemp), Nigel (Craig Jackson), Ben (Evan Hengst), Zeno (Garth Collins), and Earl (Lou Beatty Jr.).

The film builds through a series of confrontations that escalate in violence and stakes. Nate takes punishment that would kill or incapacitate anyone else, and he keeps moving forward. The mystery of what the crew really wants, and where Sherry is being held, tightens as Nate gets closer. The tone stays loose even as the stakes turn bloody, and Quaid's likable everyman charm holds the absurd premise together. The synopsis stops here, before the climax and resolution.[edit]