...[Novocaine is] billed as a comedy but the joke goes missing in the first few minutes amid the volume of blood splashed around on the screen.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 7, 2025

It's not as fun as it should be...

| Apr 4, 2025

Novocaine feels like a brainstorming session for itself, which is all very well, until you realise that the only part being fully exercised is the lizard brain.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 4, 2025

Quaid’s personable screen presence holds things together, even as his brutally beaten body starts to fall apart. But this gory action comedy has just one joke, and like poor, battered and bleeding Nathan it starts to run out of juice.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2025

It’s an exquisite, though unintentional, symbol of the contemporary studio action movie... These films have become profoundly boring because their protagonists don’t appear to feel pain.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 29, 2025

Beyond the creative stunt choreography, Novocaine doesn’t leave much of an impression full stop, and its saccharine ending relegates it to a category of films with intriguing premises that end up ultimately forgettable.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 27, 2025

A largely painless viewing experience — but it could have been far more pleasurable.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 25, 2025

Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen take this dumb-clever, fake-movie-science idea and run with it as hard and as fast as they can in one straight direction, using Nate’s condition as an excuse for pure, unchecked mayhem.

| Mar 17, 2025

It’s a repetitive bloodbath without the adrenaline of some action marathons like John Wick. Instead of wondering how much more Nathan Caine can endure, I’m left wondering how much more Novocaine I can stomach.

| Mar 17, 2025

It helps that Quaid is so good at landing every punchline, if not punch. His Nathan may not have any sense of pain, but Quaid gives him a great sense of humour.

| Mar 15, 2025

Berk and Olsen accomplish a formidable action-comedy, one that puts their horror roots in neon lights and sense of humor on equal display.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 14, 2025

“Novocaine” makes a convincing argument that its lead, Jack Quaid, can do it all: woo the girl, shoot the goon and tickle the audience. The movie itself has a harder time, screwing its three genres together so awkwardly that it tends to limp.

| Mar 14, 2025

None of it makes sense, even if he does stop for an adrenaline injection, but if we wanted to see something make sense we’d be at a different movie.

| Original Score: B- | Mar 14, 2025

What keeps it from deflating into tiresome shtick (which it very nearly does) is Quaid with his gawky, boyish charisma, an actual tough guy who just doesn’t know how to act it.

| Mar 13, 2025

Despite the stylish direction from the duo of Dan Berk and Robert Olsen and winning performances by Jack Quaid and Amber Midthunder, “Novocaine” sputters to the finish line.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 13, 2025

The almost nonstop fighting and Mr. Quaid’s low-key charm are enough to make the movie a serviceable action offering. Moreover, the script, though focused on wacky spasms of violence, has a strong human element at its core.

| Mar 13, 2025

It’s like watching the Black Knight get dismembered in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” except that was funny and the gag didn’t run nearly two hours. To my surprise, I was bored by the gruesome and repetitive carnage.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 13, 2025

In trying to have it both ways, it succeeds in neither, in the process stranding its charming leading man in a saga that needed to be either goofier or more gruesome.

| Mar 13, 2025

On the heels of some bad action comedies... “Novocaine” is pretty enjoyable

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 12, 2025

Quaid makes for a lovable numskull — literally — in this spiffy, splattery action-comedy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 12, 2025