Jack Quaid Is an Action Star Who Feels No Pain in First Novocaine Trailer

There’s always room in American theaters for a charming action comedy about folks sustaining grievous bodily harm, and considering the newly released first trailer for the Jack Quaid-starring Novocaine, this looks like one entry that fits the bill. The high-concept premise of the film, directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, casts Quaid’s character Nathan Caine as “a mild-mannered introvert with a rare disorder, congenital insensitivity to pain.” That trait ends up coming in somewhat handy when Caine must suddenly become an action star in order to rescue his girlfriend (Amber Midthunder of Prey) after she’s taken hostage during a bank robbery.

Viewers with a decent memory will observe that this premise is technically not all that different from that of the original Kick-Ass, whose titular hero also has a “resistance to pain,” but where that trait hardly defined the character in two films, here it’s clearly the basis of most of the comedy. Quaid, a star of Amazon’s The Boys and of the 2022 Scream reboot among other things, is playing a more nebbish character here who is falling ass-backward into becoming a human wrecking ball, thanks to his ability to simply endure things that the other goons he’s fighting cannot. In the trailer below, that includes such injuries as having a knife stuck through his hand, or submerging another hand in boiling cooking oil to retrieve a gun.

Note, of course, that simply being unable to feel pain doesn’t mean Quaid’s Novocaine character wouldn’t still end up 100% dead in real life from things like massive blood loss and sepsis. The trailer makes the obligatory Wolverine reference by way of pointing out that Caine is not immortal, but in terms of Marvel comparisons it seems more likely to us that Quaid ends up looking something like Deadpool/Wade Wilson after all the abuse he ends up absorbing. Here’s hoping his girlfriend is still interested if he’s little more than a mass of scar tissue by the time this rescue is completed.

Novocaine is currently ticketed for U.S. theaters on March 14, 2025. In the meantime, check out the bloody first trailer below.