Novocaine star Jack Quaid has carved himself a niche by playing the everyman archetype with a genre twist. In The Boys, he's a nobody thrust into a world of superheroes. In Star Trek: Lower Decks, he's an ambitious worker bee on a starship.

SXSW: His Nathan Caine might not be able to feel pain, but oh, the audience will be wincing by the time Dan Berk and Robert Olson's initially clever feature lands its final blow.

Building a strong narrative clearly took a backseat to inventing fun ways to take advantage of the hero’s rare medical condition.

That's certainly the case with the central character of Novocaine, Dan Berk and Robert Olsen's action-comedy about a man genetically incapable of feeling pain. As played winningly by Jack Quaid, Nathan Caine is a new kind of action hero.

Quaid plays a timid introvert who dates a colleague, sees her abducted by a brutal gang and takes matters into his own hands to get her back 3/5 stars Characters who are impervious to pain, or have an exceptionally high pain threshold,