Fresh and Exciting

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Dr. Frank Sangster (Steve Martin) is a straight-laced dentist engaged to his assistant Jean Noble (Laura Dern). Pat (Lynne Thigpen) is the office manager. Then sexy patient Susan Ivey (Helena Bonham Carter) comes looking for prescription drugs. He prescribes 5 pills but she scrams 50 out of the pharmacist. He constantly tries to bail out his slacker brother Harlan (Elias Koteas). Then Susan comes back pulling him into a web of danger and her handsy criminal brother Duane (Scott Caan).This one didn't make me laugh once. It could have been an interesting crime noir but this needs to strip away the attempts at comedy. It also needs to be darker and more intense. Director David Atkins's amateur skills aren't good enough. Also Frank's lies don't make much sense either and his narration that he wants to see Susan again doesn't really solve it. It's just constructed poorly.

The most remarkable thing about this poor film is that the enormously talented Steve Martin is, by far, the worst thing about it.Novocaine is a mishmash of film noir and humor. Frank Sangster (Steve Martin) is a successful dentist who is engaged to his hygienist Jean (Laura Dern), a seemingly All-American blonde. The only burr under Frank's saddle is his no account loser of a brother, Harlan (Elias Koteas), who's moved into Frank's house. They have the sort of relationship where the good brother always feels a little guilty that he's better off than the bad brother. Jean and Harlan don't get along but other than that, Frank's life seems quite squared away.That is until Susan (Helena Bonham Carter) shows up in Frank's dentist chair one morning. Susan does have a bad tooth, but what she really wants is to scam some drugs out of Frank. He knows that right away, but goes along with it because he is instantly and irresistibly attracted to her. Susan and Frank have sex, she gets even more drugs out of him, and then Susan's incestuous and violent brother Duane (Scott Caan) gets involved. Frank also has to deal with a federal agent who shows up and wants to see the drugs Susan and Duane have stolen, but Frank doesn't want to turn Susan in. Then someone shows up dead in Frank's house with Frank's teeth marks all over them and Frank has to figure out who's framing him and what he can do about it.Steve Martin is simply bad in this movie and I don't have the slightest idea why. The man can certainly act but he gives a wooden, shallow performance here that undermines the whole film. There is one moment, when someone Frank loves turns up dead, where Martin shows some believable emotion. For the rest of the movie, though, it's like someone is forcing him to play this character and he's just going through the motions to get it over with. The noir hero has to be a bundle of lust and fear and anger and shame and there's none of that in Frank Sangster. And since the audience needs to really care about Frank for anything else in Novocaine to work, none of it really does.Of course, very little of Novocaine would work even if Martin gave the greatest performance in noir history. There's no real rhyme or reason to the mystery of this story, though it is well constructed. As more and more things go wrong and Frank gets deeper and deeper in trouble, everything fits together fairly well. The problem is that there are moments of comedy, black comedy and even slapstick comedy laced throughout the movie and it completely ruins any attempt at creating a tone or mood. It's as though this script started out as either completely serious noir or as an overtly comedic take on the genre but as things went along, someone decided it either needed more funny stuff or more serious stuff and just crammed it in wherever they felt like it. For example, there are two scenes where Kevin Bacon, of all people, shows up as a Hollywood actor tagging along with the police investigating Frank. Those scenes serve absolutely no purpose other than getting the audience to say "Hey look! It's Kevin Bacon!" This weird dissonance extends to the two lead actresses. Laura Dern plays this very broad, deliberately mockable character that could have fit in with Christopher Guest's Best in Show or A Mighty Wind. But Helena Bonham Carter plays her character relatively straight, trying to be genuinely dramatic and all that.It also doesn't help the film that Frank's supposed to be completely screwed up over Susan and Bonham Carter just isn't sexy. She's certainly pretty and she certainly can act but she does not have sensual charisma on screen. I've seen her in other roles where she does a fine job in other respects, but there's always something cold about her and she's positively frigid here. She even goes topless in Novocaine and it still doesn't help.Elias Koteas probably gives the best performance in this movie, but his character is barely more than a plot device that's introduced at the beginning and then forgotten about until needed for the end.Novocaine also has the worst voice-over narration since Blade Runner. You know, that narration that Harrison Ford supposedly read badly on purpose so they wouldn't put in the movie, but they used it anyway? That narration that was eliminated from all those special edition director's cuts of Blade Runner they've churned out? The narration in Novocaine is that bad. Steve Martin could have been reading out of a an instruction manual for all the emotion and energy he conveys.Novocaine is one of those bad films that would've been better if it had been even worse. There's nothing here so egregiously horrible you can enjoy making fun of it. Unless you fancy seeing Steve Martin do probably the worst acting job in his career, that is.

Steve Martin is believable as a dentist who sees his life spiraling out of control after a series of cascading lies sets him up as a murder suspect. What is not believable is the script, which seems to overlook common sense. Cops that fall asleep while guarding a suspect, and worse yet handcuffing a suspect to a flimsy bench in the court house. After an intriguing set up, everything has less and less logic. The proverbial happy ending is totally unbelievable, as is the supposed motivation for the entire storyline. If you want to see a pretty good Steve Martin performance and can overlook Novocaine's many flaws, it is definitely watchable. - MERK

I think a lot of people don't mind seeing Steve Martin again playing a dentist after his role in the 1986 version of "Little Shop of Horrors", although of course his role in this movie is quite different."Novocaine" is a movie that is using all of the classic film-noir ingredients but above all the movie is a comedy. A black-comedy but a comedy nevertheless. And it's a rather well made and written one. The movie has some nice twists but never forgets to also entertain.Steve Martin shows why he is still a much asked actor for comedies, even though his best roles are long since behind him, he still knows how to handle the genre and time things in his performances, without ever going over-the-top with anything. Helena Bonham Carter is a great femme fatale for this movie and Laura Dern also plays a surprising role. The movie also has solid supporting actors in it such as Lynne Thigpen, Elias Koteas, Keith David and Scott Caan. The older Scott Caan gets, the more he starts to look like his father, also acting-wise. Kevin Bacon also makes a totally fun cameo as an actor who is doing research for a cop role.The great and typically wacky musical main titles for the movie were composed by Danny Elfman, which set the tone for the movie really. Most of the rest of the score was composed by Steve Bartek, who normally works as Danny Elfman's orchestrator. The story is enough to draw you into the movie. It has some unexpected twists, although these all occur toward the end. The movie perhaps does become a tad bit too serious at times, which doesn't completely suit the movie and its atmosphere. Thankfully the movie is mostly just fun. It's good quality entertainment to watch and better than your average film-noir/comedy crossover attempt, which is mainly thanks to the great cast of the movie and the solid written story.7/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/