I sit in with CKTB morning show host Steph Vivier to have a look at movies in theatres including the thrills of “Black Bag,” the speculative “Can I Get A Witness?,” the psychological satire of “Opus,” the action of “Novocaine” and the aniimated antics of “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Novocaine,” a violent new rom com now playing in theatres, Jack Quaid plays a man with a congenital insensitivity to pain who is driven to extremes when the woman of his dreams is kidnapped by bank robbers.
CAST: Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Jacob Batalon, Betty Gabriel, Matt Walsh. Directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen.
REVIEW: “Novocaine’s” central premise takes its inspiration from action movies of the past with silly gimmicks.
Remember Jason Statham’s adrenalized “Crank”? How about Scarlett Johansson‘s turbo-charged brainiac “Lucy”? Or Bradley Cooper’s enhanced cognitive abilities in “Limitless”? Each of those films features characters with a special ability that turns them into a superhero of a sort.
“Novocaine” sees Jack Quaid play Nathan Caine, a nerdy assistant bank manager nicknamed Novocaine because he has a rare medical condition that prevents him from feeling pain. “I have the superpower to step on a nail,” he jokes, “and not know until my shoe fills up with blood.”
When bank teller (and Nathan’s love interest) Sherry (Amber Midthunder) is kidnapped during a robbery at the bank, Nathan uses his condition to become an accidental superhero as he risks life-and-limb to rescue her.
“Novocaine” is what I call a “qualm rom com” because after the romantic, get-to-know-you vibe of the first half hour, it takes a violent twist that may leave you with some doubts about brutality on display. Most of the gruesome stuff is played for laughs, but after an hour or so of deep-fried hands, impalement and dangerous “Home Alone” style boobytraps, the initial feel-good ambiance has been replaced with a queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach.
Luckily, guiding the action is the charming presence of everyman Quaid. As the mild-mannered Nathan he’ll do anything for love, and even when he’s reigning chaos down on anyone who gets in his way, he remains a nice guy. That congeniality goes a long way to keeping “Novocaine’s” on track, even as we get as numb to the violence as Nathan is to the pain in the film’s extended third act.
“Novocaine’s” superpower isn’t Nathan’s immunity to pain, it’s Quaid’s likability.
The new thriller from Leigh Whannell, the co-creator of “Saw” and “Insidious,” is part ripped-from-the-headlines, part “Twilight Zone.” News outlets are reporting on the trend of implanting microchips to function as contactless credit cards and key cards in humans. Whannell took that premise, ran it through the RodSerling-izer™ and added a dollop of “RoboCop” to come up with a silly and sentient piece of sci fi.
Set sometime in the near future “Upgrade” sees mechanic Grey Trace (Logan Marshall Green), an “unaugmented” man in an increasingly augmented world. Microchips and other human upgrades are common, but Grey is old fashioned, favoring humanity over any kind of mechanization. In a world of self-driving cars and “energy walls” he’s a DIY guy. When four strangers murder his wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) and leave him a quadriplegic he is wheelchair-bound and depressed until he is offered a unique opportunity.
One of his former clients, tech wizard Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), offers to implant a chip called STEM, kind of an auxiliary brain, into Grey’s spine. The bio mechanic enhancement would leave him “ungraded, better, stronger and faster than everyone else,” and, of course, in perfect shape to get bloody revenge on the men who killed his wife and shattered his life.
Like Whannell’s other movies “Upgrade” is a dark, atmospheric and grim film. Blood flows but so do ideas about our addiction to computers and what happens when machines start thinking for themselves. But don’t worry, it’s not that heady. Like all good idea-soaked sci fi b-movies, it’s more about engaging your gut with visceral, i.e. violent, action, and even some humour. It’s gutsy and gory futurist Cronenberg-esque body horror made interesting by the speed at which technology approaches some of the film’s ideas about biotechnology.
“Upgrade” becomes conventional when the police procedural subplot kicks in but until then it is B-movie fun.
