Once upon a time, there was a young woman named Nicola Peltz, who got it into her pretty little head that she wanted an acting career. Luckily, her father was Nelson Peltz, a billionaire investor who quickly got to work leveraging his connections in Hollywood. Sure enough, Nelson was able to secure his daughter a leading role in a huge upcoming blockbuster with Paramount.

This, allegedly, is how Nicola Peltz came to play Katara in The Last Airbender. This is also the alleged reason why the Water Tribe is exclusively white in that movie, as Peltz’ casting by non-negotiable executive mandate meant that the entire film had to be cast around her, but I digress. Anyway, she starred in one generational bomb and her career only got worse from there. Seriously, good luck finding anyone in the mainstream with any idea who she is.

The point being that on paper, Nicola Peltz is a textbook example of the theoretical “nepo baby.” Here we have someone with no talent or star power, who was nonetheless given every opportunity to succeed through industry connections and nothing else. And even with all of that, she still failed.

In summary, it just ain’t that easy. And it ain’t that simple.

Which brings us to Jack Quaid, progeny of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. The younger Quaid has been the subject of some “nepo baby” naysaying lately, but some honestly impressive performances in recent memory show him as a promising actor in his own right. Of course “The Boys” was his big break, but his more recent turn in Companion was dynamite. And of course his voice performance as the title role in “My Adventures with Superman” is more than worthy of the character’s legacy, which is a damned high bar to clear.

And anyway, his parents are two actors who haven’t been relevant since the ’90s. Yes, I know Dennis Quaid had a great supporting turn in The Substance, but he also had a starring turn in Reagan that same year.

So here we are with Novocaine, in which Jack Quaid gets an action movie vehicle. And he’s awesome. The rest of the movie around him isn’t exactly great, but he’s great in it.

Quaid plays Nathan Caine, a man with a rare genetic defect that makes him immune to pain. He can be killed just like anyone else, but he can’t feel pain. Which makes him ironically and surprisingly fragile.

Nathan lives his entire life with meticulous caution, because of how easily and terribly he could be hurt or seriously injured without even knowing it. He can’t touch anything overly hot or cold. He can’t be around sharp objects or corners. He can’t chew solid food for fear of accidentally biting his own tongue off. Nathan can’t even tell for himself when he has to go to the bathroom, so he sets a timer to go off every three hours.

(Side note: Caine himself gives the name of his disorder as “Congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis”. And believe it or not, that is indeed a real thing.)

With all of this in mind, it should come as no surprise that Nathan has no social life. His only real friend is Roscoe (Jacob Batolon), his online gaming partner, and the two have never met. Nathan works as an assistant manager at a credit union in San Diego, he plays a lot of video games, he reads a lot (particularly about medicine and first aid, for obvious reasons), and that’s his life.

Enter Sherry (Amber Midthunder), another employee at the same credit union. After crushing on her for however many months, Nathan finds himself in a meet-cute and strikes up a whirlwind workplace romance with Sherry. Unfortunately, that’s shortly before a crew of bank robbers come in. Within minutes, the bank manager is dead, a few cops are dead, a fortune is stolen, and Sherry is kidnapped as a hostage. Nathan sets out to save her and we’re off to the races.

To get this out of the way, the antagonists are crap. The bank robbers (played by Ray Nicholson, Conrad Kemp, and Evan Hengst) are all lunkheaded assholes with no personality, no motivation, no intelligence, and no nuance whatsoever. Also, the resident police detectives (played by Betty Gabriel and Matt Walsh) are nowhere near as intense or funny or interesting as the filmmakers seem to think they are. Jacob Batalon is phoning in the same old “nerdy comic relief” schtick that made him famous over on the MCU.

Aside from a nicely executed fake-out climax and a superbly delivered midpoint twist, the plot glides along on rails. There’s a bit of lip service about the nature and necessity of pain, especially with regard to physical vs. emotional pain, but it feels like more could’ve been done with this angle. (Again, it might’ve helped if the antagonists were the least bit engaging or effective as a mental/emotional/thematic foil for the protagonist.)

Which brings me to the single most important reason why this movie works as well as it does: The premise.

The action in this film really isn’t anything noteworthy in terms of choreography, camerawork, editing, or anything like that. What really makes the action so intensely fun is in how the filmmakers use the premise of a protagonist who can be pushed past the mortal limits of physical pain. This makes for some delightfully batshit stunts and set pieces, not to mention some gnarly prosthetic effects. It all rides the line between disgusting and hilarious, which is a wonderful place for an action/comedy to be.

At the same time, the film never lets us forget that Nathan is a milquetoast by nature. He’s always made a point of avoiding physical harm because he has no idea how fragile or how tough he might actually be. Sure, Nathan has a higher pain threshold than Tom and Jerry put together, but he doesn’t have a healing factor. He can still die. He can still be seriously injured.

The upshot is that every time Nathan tries out some off-the-wall stunt that shouldn’t be humanly possible, we get the satisfaction of watching him grow stronger and braver as a character. But at the same time, that satisfaction is tempered with the risk that this could be the stunt that finally kills him. It’s a deeply compelling balance, one that makes the action scenes engaging on so many levels and in a way that could only be possible with this movie.

Oh, and by the way, it bears remembering that Nathan has no concept of pain. He doesn’t know what pain is like for himself, so he doesn’t know what pain is like for other people. This results in a lot of on-the-fly experimentation, as Nathan tries pretty much everything to see whether and how much it hurts the other guy while he’s in the middle of a fight scene. It’s funnier to watch than I’m making it sound.

While I have no doubt that the film’s portrayal of CIPA is far more heightened than the real-life condition, I can respect that it’s depicted with some measure of empathy. The film goes into a surprising level of detail about what it’s like to live and grow up with a disability, particularly one that most other people might actually see as a superpower. (Remember, I’m autistic — I’m familiar with the concept from experience.) Much as I wish the filmmakers had gone a bit further with advocating for those with disabilities, I can appreciate what we got.

Jack Quaid delivers a true tour-de-force performance here. Whether Quaid is playing it totally straight or acting like he’s going to throw up, he can play either extreme and all points in between in a way that’s freaking hilarious to watch. There’s something about Quaid that’s innately endearing, but he can still play an action badass when he has to. And it’s hard enough to sell action scenes at this level when the character is allowed to feel pain — I can’t begin to imagine everything it takes to sell punches and kicks and serious injuries as if the character doesn’t feel anything at all.

Something else I really liked about the character is that even though Nathan is a shut-in by nature, he’s still an assistant manager at a bank. Nobody gets to be in that position without a degree of social skills. Thus we get scene after scene of Nathan trying to negotiate with other characters, verbally manipulating them in ways that could succeed or fail with equal plausibility. It’s another tough level of nuance that Quaid totally and consistently nails.

Yet as wonderful as Quaid is all throughout this movie, the film’s true secret weapon is Amber Midthunder. We’re talking about a female lead in an action movie, stuck as a damsel in distress, and the Nathan/Sherry instantaneous romance is the main character’s primary motivation. There are so many ways this could’ve gone wrong.

But then the film subverts the aforementioned “damsel in distress” trope in ways I won’t discuss here. More to the point, Midthunder does a magnificent job selling this love interest as a woman that Nathan genuinely would go to hell and back for. All throughout the first act, Sherry turns out to be a great listener and fun to be around, the kind of person who can help Nathan grow past his perceived limits to be something greater. Of course it certainly helps that Sherry is broken in her own ways, she and Nathan bond over how they both had such crappy childhoods, and they complement each other nicely.

Considering how these characters only ever had one or two dates together, this minute-rice romance shouldn’t be nearly as effective as it is. Yet these two characters are written in such a way and performed with enough sizzling chemistry that it totally works.

Novocaine is proof that sometimes, all a movie needs is one fantastic gimmick. It’s a straightforward action film about a reluctant milquetoast pressured into becoming a hardcore badass (as we’ve seen with nearly every 87North production since John Wick), but the introduction of a disability adds new and compelling layers to the archetype and development arc of the protagonist. Perhaps more importantly, the very notion of a character who can’t feel pain opens up all sorts of possibilities in terms of action set pieces and character development, and the filmmakers explore those possibilities with endless aplomb.

We’ve already seen a surprising number of romance/action/comedies this year, but this is one is unique in that the romance is actually poignant, the action is fun, and the comedy is funny. It’s a genre blend that actually works, which is absolutely worth forgiving a certain lack of originality in the plot. Yes, it sucks that none of the supporting characters are the least bit engaging or nuanced, but that’s not exactly a dealbreaker when this is all about Quaid and Midthunder, and one or both of them are onscreen at pretty much all times.

I had a good time with this one. You won’t be missing much if you wait for home video, but I’ll gladly recommend it.