Novocaine’s Big Sherry Twist, Explained

This article contains massive spoilers for “Novocaine.”

Although the marketing campaign for “Novocaine” is overall a pretty clever one (especially the poster key art, which features the main character and his many injuries depicted in a style akin to the “Operation” board game), it does make the film’s plot look as old school as possible. A mild-mannered Everyman, Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid), decides to chase after some bad guy bank robbers when, during the robbery, they kidnap the love of his life, the girl-next-door bank teller Sherry (Amber Midthunder). Going by the trailers and TV spots alone, it would seem that the only twist on such a tried-and-true “hero rescues the girl” plot is that Nathan suffers from a condition which doesn’t allow him to feel pain, and thus despite his lack of combat training, he can credibly take a beating and keep on kicking.

However, it turns out that “Novocaine” has several more tricks up its sleeve than just that, especially when it comes to subverting its initial premise and the character dynamics. While Amber Midthunder may not be a household name (yet), she’s proven herself a far more capable, strong, and clever actress than to accept a standard “damsel in distress” role. As it turns out, there’s a lot more to Sherry than initially meets the eye: rather than being an innocent girl swept up in a kidnapping, it’s revealed that she had been in on the robbery the entire time. The mastermind behind the crime, Simon (Ray Nicholson), is actually her foster brother, and her part of the plan had been to seduce Nathan, the bank’s assistant manager, to get him to give her the code to the bank vault, and then she was to be faux-kidnapped by the robbers and subsequently escape with them.

While this twist is certainly nothing brand new to crime thrillers, the way it’s utilized and deployed by screenwriter Lars Jacobson and directors Dan Berk & Robert Olsen allows “Novocaine” to also be reminiscent of classic Hollywood film noir movies, rather than just be a straightforward action comedy. It’s a twist that not only makes the movie more layered and nuanced, but also grounds it further in reality, something which grants “Novocaine” the ability to have its heightened genre cake and eat it, too.

Despite initially seeming like a basic action movie, “Novocaine” is a bit of a genre amalgam, blending elements of action, horror, comedy, romantic comedy, and film noir in its cinematic stew. All of these ingredients are more than welcome, as they give the film a depth and dimension which it wouldn’t have if its only gimmick was a guy who can get hurt a lot (something which, as the film itself points out, has been done in every movie featuring Wolverine, let alone others). The romantic comedy aspect in particular is key to the film’s success, as it allows the audience time to fall in love with Nathan and Sherry as characters (and as a budding couple), enough that we yearn to see them together.

Of course, when Sherry is revealed as a turncoat, it’s a twist that carries some extra weight with it. It doesn’t just give her character a new shading, but also changes Nathan’s quest from that of a knight errant to a noir-esque patsy. That’s because we, the audience, are clued into Sherry’s true colors early, but Nathan is not. Thus, the film gets to indulge Nathan’s earnest heroism while making his various injuries sting that much more. It allows his character to simultaneously be John McClane meets Deadpool while also resembling Fred MacMurray in “Double Indemnity” and William Hurt in “Body Heat.”

There’s also a bit of a meta quality to the introduction of film noir into “Novocaine,” which is that Jack Quaid’s father, Dennis, himself portrayed a more classic noir patsy character in 1988’s “D.O.A.,” a remake of the 1950 film. The film is almost a mirror image of “Novocaine”: in “D.O.A.,” instead of not being able to be hurt, Dennis Quaid’s character is slowly dying, having been irreversibly poisoned near the beginning of the film. Instead of his character being betrayed by the woman he falls in love with, it turns out the woman he falls in love with (played by Jack Quaid’s mother, Meg Ryan) is the only person in his life who hasn’t betrayed him. Clearly, there’s a quality to both Quaid senior and junior that makes them perfect fall guys.

To its further credit, “Novocaine” does not merely pull a bait-and-switch with Sherry’s character, as both the script and Midthunder refuse to make her a mere stereotype or plot point. Sherry’s character and the way she’s portrayed almost doubles as a meta refutation of the stereotypical action movie female lead. Where initially she’s presented as an innocent love interest (and thus a “prize” waiting to be won by the macho hero), she’s then changed into a traitor, someone who makes the hero seem weaker because he was so easily hoodwinked. She’s then changed again thanks to her genuine feelings for Nathan, as she decides to try and stop her chaotic, murderous foster brother and also help save Nathan and the authorities involved, namely Detective Mincy (Betty Gabriel).

What’s especially impressive about Sherry’s character arc is that it’s not beholden to the film’s whims, but is remarkably consistent throughout. Everything Sherry reveals about herself to Nathan (and the audience) in the first act is truthful, and it’s simply the context that changes and gets filled out to explain her shifting allegiances. Thus, in the same way Quaid gets to simultaneously portray a valiant hero and a clueless doofus, Midthunder gets to be a conniving femme fatale and a heroine with a heart of gold. Rather than having to be tied to a chair or a post for most of the film, Midthunder is active throughout, and even participates in the film’s final fight sequence, getting to showcase a bit of her action movie chops. All of this makes “Novocaine” even more of a great date movie, as everyone in the audience can relate to the leads rather than anyone having to take a back seat, as it were.

A lot of the goodwill that “Novocaine” garners with its incisiveness might have been undone if the film succumbed to the typical pitfalls of wish fulfillment, as numerous genre films have in the past. The tendency for movies to try and present an unfettered happy ending is an understandable one, yet it’s something that has been done so often that it feels like not all of those endings are properly earned. Part of this isn’t even due to the desire to have a happy ending, and more to do with the narrative shortcuts in order to allow for one. In other words, we’ve all become very used to such workarounds where characters who’ve broken the law are either given huge pardons, or the ability to escape to a foreign country, or faked deaths with entirely new identities. This initially seems like where “Novocaine” is going, as Simon is defeated, Nathan is victorious (and still mostly intact), and Sherry has come back to the side of the good guys.

Yet the final twist of the film is that, while Nathan’s transgressions have mostly been pardoned due to mitigating circumstances, Sherry is indeed incarcerated, albeit for a far shorter sentence than she’d otherwise receive. The reveal that Nathan and Sherry are continuing their relationship while she’s behind bars is the final grounded icing on the genre cake, as it allows the film to have that happy ending while not completely ignoring the sense of reality that it has committed to throughout the movie. Ultimately, “Novocaine” is a fantasy, of course; a real-life Nathan wouldn’t be able to take that much physical punishment no matter what condition he had or how many epipens he used, Sherry would still be in jail for a long time as an accomplice to robbery and murder, and so on. Yet the film does what so many great genre movies do, which is to present a total fiction with enough truth (or things that feel true, at least) so that it can be swallowed easily. It’s the vegetables that need to accompany the fried foods, or — to use a more relevant metaphor — the anesthetic that allows the operation to be performed.

In a genre movie landscape that was starting to look increasingly unwell, “Novocaine” ends up acting just like its namesake.