NOVOCAINE

Let's be straight with you: this is a well-made movie we're still asking you to skip. NOVOCAINE is a comic thriller with real spark — funny, exciting, and, to our surprise, genuinely heartfelt. Its hero risks life and limb to save the woman he loves, and the story honors that kind of sacrificial devotion.

But the film earns its R and then some. It piles up nearly a hundred obscenities, including seventy "f" words. And the violence is not just strong but cringe-inducing — a man plunges his hand into a vat of burning oil to grab a gun, glass shards get scraped across a face, a knife impales a hand. It's the kind of intensity that lingers for the wrong reasons.

So here's our answer: the quality is real, but the excess is worse. This one crosses the line into what we can only call excessive and unacceptable. Skip it.

Nate Caine is an assistant bank manager in San Diego with an unusual condition: he can't feel pain. He's a reclusive video-game nerd who's long carried a crush on Sherry, a pretty bank teller — and their first date goes well.

Then three masked robbers hold up the bank. One of them, a genuine psychopath, murders the manager and takes Sherry hostage. Impervious to pain and desperate to save the woman he loves, Nate commandeers a police car and gives chase. A surprise twist waits down the road — and that's where we'll leave you.

Three stars, and we mean them. NOVOCAINE works as entertainment. It's a real roller-coaster ride — exciting, frequently funny, and, more than you'd expect from the premise, dotted with heartfelt moments. The central gimmick, a hero who can't feel pain, powers a string of clever set pieces, and the plot keeps twisting, including one big mid-film turn that changes everything for Nate and Sherry.

The engine underneath it all is a simple, sturdy question: will true love prevail, assuming both of them survive the day? That's enough to pull you through the twists and turns. The filmmaking is competent and the pacing brisk. This is not an incompetent movie — which is precisely why its excesses are such a waste of a good thriller.

Strip away the excess and there's a surprisingly decent moral spine here. The story is set at Christmas and carries what amounts to a strong Christian, redemptive, and moral outlook: a man lays everything on the line — life and limb — to rescue the woman he loves. That kind of sacrificial devotion echoes the highest picture of love Scripture gives us. The film also treats the police positively and portrays the bank and its employees as decent, honest people. Evil, embodied in a vicious psychopath, is clearly evil.

So the trouble isn't the film's heart. The trouble is everything the film pours over that heart. Nearly a hundred obscenities, the Lord's name abused, and violence so intense it's painful to watch bury the redemptive story under material no discerning viewer should have to wade through. There's also an implied premarital encounter that treats fornication casually.

A good message doesn't sanctify bad delivery. When a story about laying down your life for another is drowned in profanity and brutality, the excess doesn't just distract — it works against the very thing the film is trying to say. "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). The devotion NOVOCAINE reaches for is real; the way it's told squanders it.

There's a good movie somewhere inside NOVOCAINE — funny, exciting, even tender about a man laying down everything for love. But it's buried under nearly a hundred obscenities and violence too brutal to recommend. However well-made, the excess wins out, so our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something the whole family can enjoy? Try our latest family-friendly picks.