Novocaine
(15), 110mins
★★★★★
IT would be easy to throw the “nepo baby” tag at Jack Quaid.
After all, his parents are Hollywood stars Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid.
But sometimes you’ve got to accept that great genes can mean great talent.
Jack is the new everyman actor we need right now, never mind which way he got there.
Having recently impressed as the lead in the sci-fi movie Companion, he’s a full blown romantic action hero in Novocaine.
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Blue-eyed, with his dad’s winning smile, Jack doesn’t just perform knockabout comedy, he does knock your teeth out, incinerate your hand comedy.
Jack plays Nate Caine who has a genetic disorder which means he can’t feel any pain.
The mild mannered assistant bank manager has tennis balls on sharp edges and pours hot coffee on to ice in order to reduce the risk of injury.
But when a trio of robbers dressed as Santa Claus take his girlfriend hostage after holding up the bank, Nate suddenly finds his inoculation to suffering proves to be useful.
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Chasing down the kidnappers, it doesn’t matter how hard he’s punched he’s always able to come back for more.
This is laugh out loud “ouch, I bet that hurt” humour in the tradition of Buster Keaton, which includes nods to classic movies such as Home Alone and Die Hard.
There’s a brilliant you-know-what’s-coming sequence when Jack enters a bobby-trapped house and a homage to Bruce Willis’s famous shattered glass scene in one innovative take-down of a bad guy.
Jack, though, is more akin to Tom Hanks in that he plays the “regular guy” rather than the ripped hunk that is so popular in the movie industry these days.
I’ve also grown a bit tired of the wisecracking stars that populate too many films, so the self-deprecating Nate is a refreshing change.
It helps that the female lead Amber Midthunder, as the love interest Sherry, has genuine on screen chemistry.
Beyond the premise and some of the fresh ways to die, there isn’t too much original about Novocaine.
And you’ll need to be desensitised to blood and gore, because there’s a lot of that in Novocaine.
But if you want a laugh this weekend give this a shot, it won’t hurt.
A WORKING MAN
(15), 116mins
★★☆☆☆
THE costume department for Jason Statham’s latest shoot ’em up movie must have been on overtime.
There are biker drug dealers with horns on their Nazi style helmets, a baddie called Dimi dressed like Austin Powers and two mobsters in the blingest shell suits you’ve ever seen.
The only one letting the side down is Mr Statham, who sticks to his standard grey dress sense.
But the gruff British star has never been one to change his act.
He is wise enough not to ever attempt an accent, unlike all his co-stars doing their worst Ruski “zon’t mez wiv me” impressions – with Jason Flemyng’s particularly bad.
This is essentially Taken with Rambo levels of violence.
Statham’s Levon Cade is an ex-British military man working on a US building site who accepts the task of saving his boss’s kidnapped daughter.
There’s a couple of inventive action scenes, but the skull cracking body count got a bit too much for me. I also gave up trying to follow the plot because everyone does the opposite of what makes sense.
A Working Man makes plausibility redundant.
THE WOMAN IN THE YARD
(15), 88mins
★★☆☆☆
RAMONA and her two kids are having breakfast in their “fixer-upper” house when a woman covered in a black shawl turns up on their lawn.
Son Tay (Peyton Jackson) jokes that the mysterious visitor is “probably dead.”
Leaving the audience to work out whether the woman of the title is a ghost, some other supernatural being or a figment of the imagination.
On the way to this conclusion the truth about Ramona’s life, including why she uses crutches and what happened to her husband is revealed.
But getting to the end is a tiresome experience that even the talented Danielle Deadwyler can’t lift.
There were only so many times that director Jaume Collet-Serra could try to trick me into believing something was real when it wasn’t, before I couldn’t care less what was actually going on.
This psychological horror tries to be sophisticated, but relies too much on cliches such as the family thinking the creepy loft is a safe place.
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Plus the woman in the yard isn’t particularly scary.
If I want to be creeped out by a strange person sitting in front of me, I can get that on the bus most days.
