Review: 'Novocaine' is a decent, if bloody, action comedy that sneaks in some heart and soul

The action movie “Novocaine” centers on one man becoming a human piñata, and to whatever extent that premise works, it’s because of the charm of the young star doing it, Jack Quaid.

Quade plays Nate Caine, an assistant manager at a San Diego bank branch. He’s one of the good ones, though, as we see early when he quietly bends the rules to give a widowed hardware store owner (Lou Beatty Jr.) until after Christmas to pay his mortgage. Nate is also sweet on one of the bank’s tellers, Sherry (Amber Midthunder) — and when he finally gets up the nerve to ask her out for coffee, he’s surprised that she says yes.

On their first date, Nate tells Sherry a secret: He has a condition, called CIPA — for Congenital Insensitivity to Pain and Anhydrosis — in which the person afflicted cannot feel pain. This condition, Nate tells Sherry, is quite dangerous, and has required him to be exceedingly careful in his life. For example, he consumes only protein shakes and blenderized foods, because if he chews solid food, he runs the risk of severely biting his tongue. Their real date ends at his place, quite romantically.

The next day at the bank, Nate’s reverie is shattered by three robbers in Santa outfits, carrying machine guns. The robbers kill the bank manager, and threaten to kill Sherry unless Nate gives them the combination to the vault. They make off with the cash, and take Sherry along as a hostage as they shoot several cops who have arrived outside the bank.

Nate, determined to save Sherry from the crooks, steals a police car (taking a moment to put a tourniquet on the injured cop) and gives chase. This is how directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, whose last movie was the forest survival thriller “Significant Other,” set in motion a series of set pieces that take advantage of Nate’s no-pain condition to create cringe-inducing physical violence. In an early scene, Nate fights with one robber in a restaurant, and one of the gags involves Nate retrieving a gun from a deep fryer.

It’s gross, and gets downright gory as it goes. But soon a viewer becomes oddly fascinated with the way the directors and screenwriter Lars Jacobsen commit so completely to the gag. It may be a one-joke story, but that joke is played and replayed hilariously and rather fearlessly.

If you don’t know Jack Quaid’s work yet on “The Boys” or “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” his name may lead you to suspect he’s a nepo baby, and you’d be right, twice over. Quaid is the son of stars Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, and it’s apparent that charisma is an inherited trait. He’s a pleasure to watch, and brings a lightness to a role that could get weirdly heavy.

Some of the movie’s success also goes to Midthunder (“Prey”), who delivers a lot more than a typical damsel in distress, and to Jacob Batalon (from the Tom Holland “Spider-Man” trilogy) in a role that it’s best not to know much about in advance.

The premise of “Novocaine” can’t quite sustain the movie’s full length, but it gets points for being more real about CIPA than it needs to be — and for surreptitiously splicing a nice romantic comedy into what could have been just another blood-fueled action comedy.

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‘Novocaine’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 14, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, and language throughout. Running time: 110 minutes.

Review: 'The Day the Earth Blew Up' brings back two of the Looney Tunes stars for a feature-length exercise in comic craziness

It’s odd to realize that the Looney Tunes gang — the manic cartoon characters who became synonymous with the name “Warner Bros.” — has never starred in a fully animated feature-length movie before this new one, “The Day the Earth Blew Up.” 

Then you watch the movie, which is packed to the gills with inventive gags and features two of the troupe’s most engaging characters, and see that sustaining the Looney Tunes’ antics for 90 minutes isn’t as easy as it looks.

The movie tells us the origin story of Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, brothers from another species who are raised from babyhood by kindly Farmer Jim. (Porky and Daffy are both voiced by Eric Bauza, the current holder of Mel Blanc’s title as the man of many voices.) They live together in the house Farmer Jim left them, which has become a neighborhood eyesore — and is in even worse shape after an apparent meteorite tore through the roof before landing just out of town.

An astronomer spots that meteorite and follows it to its crash site, and realizes that it’s not a meteorite but a UFO. Before he can alert the authorities, the green goo from the UFO turns him into a zombie, tasked with spreading the brain-altering goo to the rest of the population. The vehicle for that alien invasion is the town’s gum factory — where Porky and Daffy just landed menial jobs.

The plot, of which there’s just a little too much, kicks into gear when Daffy convinces Porky that there’s something sinister about the factory’s new gum flavor. They enlist the help of the factory’s renegade flavor scientist, Petunia Pig (voiced by Candi Milo), who didn’t like the new gum flavor anyway. The three find themselves going up against an alien, known only as the Invader (voiced by Peter MacNicol), who says he’s out for Earth’s most precious resource. (No spoilers on what that is.)

Director Peter Browngardt and the 11 writers credited with the screenplay clearly love the old Looney Tunes characters and vibe, and largely succeed in translating that classic feel to a new audience. The movie opts to show Daffy in his more manic phase — the live wire of Robert Clampett’s shorts, rather than the cynical con artist of the Chuck Jones era — to match Porky’s nervous energy. (One Easter egg comes when Porky and Daffy eat at a diner named after Clampett, and the waitress is voiced by Clampett’s daughter, Ruth.)

It’s notable that while Warner Bros. Animation made “The Day the Earth Blew Up,” Warner Bros. Pictures — who shelved the already completed “Coyote vs. Acme” as a write-off — turned over distribution to a smaller company, Ketchup Entertainment. It’s another sad sign that the corporate overlords at Warner Bros. have no love for the movies.

The movie’s length exposes a paradox: The plot requires passages where the action slows down and the audience can take a break from that manic energy — but it’s that mania that makes the Looney Tunes who and what they are, so those slower moments expose the cracks in the facade. When the Looney Tunes can create perfect narratives in 8 minutes, taking 90 minutes feels like an unnecessary luxury, no matter how many jokes they can cram into that space..

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‘The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for cartoon violence/action and rude/suggestive humor. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'Mickey 17' brings filmmaker Bong Joon Ho back to science fiction, with an absurdist and weirdly funny take on class labor divisions.

In the absurdist science-fiction comedy “Mickey 17,” director Bong Joon Ho returns to the class-conscious satire of his Oscar-winning “Parasite” and his dystopian “Snowpiercer” — and the results are funny, thought-provoking and rather enraging.

It’s 2054, we’re told, on the ice planet Niflheim, and Mickey Barnes has fallen through a crevasse, where he’s badly wounded and about to be attacked by the planet’s creepy-crawly native population. His buddy, Timo (Steven Yeun), sees he’s about to die, and days, “See you tomorrow.”

Then the story rewinds four years to explain the situation. Mickey and Timo are desperate to get off of Earth, because of a sadistic loan shark to whom they owe money, so they sign on for the colonial ship to Niflheim. Timo gets a gig as a pilot, while Mickey — because he didn’t read the brochure — applies for the job of “expendable.” 

The job title is literal, as he’s assigned to do all the work that’s guaranteed to get him killed. His body then is cloned in a flesh-making 3D printer, and his memory downloaded into the new version. Expendables are illegal on Earth, and allowed only on off-world missions — and, thanks to pressure from certain morality-driven politicians, it’s “an abomination” to have more than one copy of an expendable alive at a time.

The Mickey that fell into the crevasse was the 17th edition of Mickey, who in his narration says that even though he’s done it a lot, dying is an experience best avoided. If there’s an upside to this job, Mickey discovers, it’s starting a romance with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a member of the ship’s security forces. 

Mickey serves the ship’s commander, a former congressman named Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), and his controlling wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), who rule the ship with a messianic zeal. Ruffalo’s fearless caricature of a blustering and none-too-bright leader with a God complex sets the bar for what I’m predicting will be at least four years of such portrayals. Collette, whose role suggests Angela Lansbury’s manipulator in “The Manchurian Candidate,” is equally game to lean into her character’s awfulness. 

Bong, who wrote and directed (adapting Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel “Mickey7”), captures the strangeness of Mickey’s unique situation with a healthy dose of dark humor and a streak of barely concealed class division. Bong’s team, particularly cinematographer Darius Khondji and production designer Fiona Crombie, give the movie’s zealous colonists, nerdy scientists and swarming creatures a grounding in realism, creating worlds that feel gritty and lived in.

Amid a strong supporting cast — look for Stephen Park (“Fargo”), Holliday Grainger (“C.B. Strike”) and Anamaria Vartolomei (“Happening”) in key roles — Pattinson shines in the role, or roles, of Mickey. Pattinson embraces the comic aspects of Mickey’s weird existence, and shows the evolution of Mickey’s heart and spine, even if it takes a few iterations to get it right. 

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‘Mickey 17’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 7, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violent content, language throughout, sexual content and drug material. Running time: 139 minutes.

Review: 'Night of the Zoopocalypse' is a weird animated blend of kiddie humor and creepy zombie animals

You rightly don’t expect a kid-targeted cartoon to carry a credit that says “inspired by a concept by Clive Barker,” which makes the animated “Night of the Zoopocalypse” an odd beast indeed — too creepy for younger viewers and too silly for a teen audience.

It’s closing time at the zoo, and Gracie (voiced by Gabbi Kosmidis), a wolf who thinks herself smarter than her pal, is prowling around alone. She finds the zoo’s latest acquisition, a mountain lion named Dan (voiced by “Stranger Things” star David Harbour), who’s recently been captured in the wild. The “you don’t like me and I don’t like you” dialogue practically writes itself — even if the script for this Canadian-Belgian-French co-production is credited to Steven Hoban and James Kee.

When Gracie sees a glowing magenta meteor land in the zoo, she gets curious. When she sees a cute rabbit from the petting zoo eat a glowing nugget, and turn into a zombie-like critter with glowing eyes and neon-colored fur, Gracie gets scared. When the demon bunny starts spreading its voraciousness — and its gummy-like texture — to other zoo animals, including her own wolfpack, Gracie realizes she needs help. 

Gracie and Dan make an uneasy truce, while a few other animals hide out in the gift shop and try to come together to fight back. They include: Felix (voiced by Park Sun-Hyung Lee), an untrustworthy baboon; Frida (voiced by Heather Loreto), a feisty capybara; Ash (voiced by “Kids in the Hall” alum Scott Thompson), a nervous ostrich; and Xavier (voiced by Pierre Simpson), a lemur whose love of old movies allows him to tell the others (and the audience) what happens next in a monster movie like this one.

Directors Rodrigo Perez-Castro and Ricardo Curtis deploy a colorful palette — particularly the moody purples and vile greens of the animals who are turned into possessed zombies — and keep things moving briskly.

Watching “Night of the Zoopocalypse” put me in mind of this year’s Oscar winner for animated feature, the Latvian film “Flow.” Both movies focused on a group of animals of different species who had to come together and learn to trust each other for their survival. “Flow” did it without the bargain-basement dialogue or cartoonish plotting used here, though — a lesson for all filmmakers who think audiences need every story beat telegraphed long before they happen. 

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‘Night of the Zoopocalypse’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 7, in theaters. Rated PG for action/peril and scary images throughout. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'The Rule of Jenny Pen' is a serviceable suspense thriller, and a chance to see John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush trade theatrical hamminess

Insanity runs deep in a nursing home in “The Rule of Jenny Pen,” a suspense thriller that seems designed primarily to let two old warhorses — John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush — chew as much scenery as they, and we, can stomach.

Rush plays Stefan Mortensen, an imperious New Zealand judge who has a stroke in the middle of a sentencing hearing. He heads to an out-of-the-way nursing home for recuperation, where he talks condescendingly to his roommate, Tony Garfield (George Henare), a retired rugby player

Tony looks tough, but it turns out there’s someone who terrifies him: Dave Crealy, played by Lithgow. Dave appears to be a dotty patient at the nursing home, who wears on his hand a doll’s head puppet that he calls Jenny Pen. It doesn’t take Stefan long to learn, the hard way, that Dave is a psychopath who brutally terrorizes the other patients while playing the addled old man for the harried and uncaring staff. 

Dave recognizes in Stefan both the ultimate challenge — a man of letters — and also the ultimate trophy to take down. Stefan, who needs a wheelchair to get around, finds himself in a battle of wills and wits with a ruthless opponent and with no assistance. 

Director James Ashcroft, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eli Kent (adapting a short story by Owen Marshall), mixes a fascinating concoction, finding creepy suspense within the sedate confines of a nursing home. It takes a few wild swings, and a few leaps of willful narrative ignorance (seriously, does the staff ever look at the surveillance footage?), but it earns its chills and scares.

The main draw to “The Rule of Jenny Pen” is watching Rush and Lithgow match their acting skills in a theatrical face-off. One could easily imagine Lithgow using his autocratic voice, the one he deploys so well in “Conclave,” to play the judge while Rush went to town as the psycho with his best “Pirates of the Caribbean” hamminess. Switching it up allows both actors to command their best solo moments, and allow them to spark off each other in their shared scenes. Together, they put some grand polish on what could have been a standard suspense thriller.

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‘The Rule of Jenny Pen’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 7, at AMC West Jordan and Regal Crossroads (Taylorsville). Rated R for violent content including sexual assault, and some language. Running time: 104 minutes. 

Review: 'Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat' recounts the rocky road to independence for African countries, and the Cold War games the U.S. played there

Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’ documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is a rich account of a violent history that most Americans have likely forgotten — which is a shame, since American tax dollars, funneled through the CIA, financed a lot of it.

It’s also a history that’s punctuated by American jazz music, as some notable musicians protested the violence, while others toured Africa on goodwill tours — usually not knowing that the tours were paid for by CIA front groups.

The key date in the action is June 30, 1960, the day the Republic of the Congo (now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo) officially became independent of its colonizers, Belgium. The key figure here is Patrice Lumumba, who became the country’s first prime minister shortly before his 35th birthday, and was deposed in a military coup led by Col. Mobutu Sese Seko a few months later — and killed by a firing squad the following January. 

Grimonprez, using archival footage and readings of memoirs and letters from several people in the thick of it, captures the backstory of how Lumumba rose to prominence — starting with the influence of Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, who oversaw the independence movement of his country three years earlier, and launched the Pan-African movement, which encouraged independence from colonizers across the continent. 

The West, particularly the United States, saw the growing independence movement across Africa through a Cold War lens. The reasoning went that if these new African nations were against their former oppressors — the United Kingdom, France and Belgium, all America’s allies — they could easily side with the Communist regimes of the USSR and China. And in the brutal calculus of men like John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower’s CIA chief, installing a dictator who was on the American side was better than allowing a democratically elected leader like Lumumba to rule. That’s how Mubuto came to lead that country, which he renamed Zaire, ruthlessly from 1965 to his death in 1997.

The United States didn’t do much to win Lumumba over, as the movie tells it. The U.S. government did give Lumumba official lodging on his one trip to D.C. — even letting him sleep on a bed that Belgium’s King Leopold II once slept in, something the Belgians didn’t like one bit. But Eisenhower canceled a meeting with Lumumba, the movie tells us, opting instead to play a round of golf. 

The other government entity with a role here — besides Eisenhower’s White House and Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union — was the United Nations. In the U.N.’s General Assembly, a coalition of African and Asian nations formed a powerful voting bloc, passing resolutions against the European countries that used to control their territories. At the urging of members, the U.N.’s secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, sent peacekeeping troops to keep Lumumba’s government in place as Belgian forces worked to oust the newly independent government.

Grimonprez also features archived interviews with some of the spies who worked out of Congo back in the day, in which they hint at war crimes before coyly backing away from any such suggestion. Through those interviews, and the documents unearthed years after the fact, a clear narrative emerges that the American government, their European allies and various economic interests – including a major mining company that aimed to profit from Congo’s reserves of uranium — thought Lumumba was a hindrance to their plans.

Setting this to the jazz music of the day — with footage of such greats as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln (who led a protest within U.N. headquarters) — the movie builds a furious tension, while also highlighting the American racial divide that informed many of the U.S. government’s decisions.

Grimonprez packs a lot into “Soundtrack of a Coup d’Etat,” which clocks in at two-and-a-half hours and feels like it could have gone on much longer. The result is a powerful history lesson, set to a strong beat.

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‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 28, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for war footage and language. Running time: 150 minutes; in Dutch, Russian, French, Arabic and English, with subtitles. 

Review: 'The Monkey' is a horror movie dripping in blood and humorous irony, but the mix doesn't always hold together

If the “Saw” movies kept their gore but were repurposed as farcical comedies, they might look a lot like “The Monkey,” in which writer-director Osgood Perkins reveals his funny bone — and a lot of other bones, blood and viscera as well.

Freely adapted from a Stephen King short story, “The Monkey” starts with a frantic pilot (Adam Scott, in an unnerving cameo) entering a pawn shop trying to unload a wind-up monkey that plays a drum. Before the pilot can make a deal, the monkey starts banging on its drum — and when it stops, something awful happens.

The action then moves to the pilot’s sons, twin brothers Bill and Hal (played as teens by Christian Convery). The twins share a mutual animosity, as Bill bullies Hal and blames Hal for their dad leaving their mom, Lois (Tatiana Maslany). The boys start exploring the stuff Dad left behind, and find a massive hatbox that contains a drumming wind-up monkey.

It doesn’t take long to discover the monkey’s secret: When it finishes playing its drum, someone nearby dies horribly. The monkey also can’t be directed to killing a specific person (“it doesn’t take requests,” young Hal says at one point). So, after some gruesome deaths — which Perkins presents with the complex absurdity of a Rube Goldberg contraption — the boys decide to throw the monkey down the deepest well they can find.

Move forward 25 years, to the present day, and the adult Hal (now played by Theo James) lives a solitary life, avoiding contact with his twin and his son, Petey (Colin O’Brien). On his one week of the year when he has custody, Hal and Petey find their theme park plans upended when the monkey resurfaces — as does Bill. 

Perkins, the guy behind last year’s creepy “Longlegs,” seems to be having lots of fun devising clever ways for characters to die in freakish and gruesome ways. He also features a fair share of oddballs, including the twins’ brash Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy, from “Schitt’s Creek”), a fumbling priest (Nicco Del Rio), and Petey’s self-help guru stepdad (Elijah Wood). 

But Perkins doesn’t maintain a consistent tone between the blood-splattered hilarity and the more complicated handling of Hal’s emotional state, and the movie suffers for it. Perkins is a seriously good director, but he needs to work on balancing the serious with the silly.

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‘The Monkey’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, language throughout and some sexual references. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'No Other Land' gives an inside look at Palestinians being forced off their land, and offers a viewpoint not often seen

The documentary “No Other Land” chronicles life in a group of Palestinian villages on the West Bank — and if merely mentioning the setting doesn’t clue you in on the complexities of the narrative, you haven’t been paying attention.

The Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta say their families have lived on this part of the West Bank for more than a century. The Israeli officials and soldiers who occupy the land say otherwise, that the land is a training area for their tanks — and the Israeli courts have upheld that claim. 

So, as the movie shows, Israeli soldiers regularly come to a house, order the residents out with barely enough time to gather their belongings, and then direct construction vehicles to tear the house down. The people living there often move into nearby caves, which anyone would agree is a poor substitute for four walls and a roof.

Two Palestinians, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, and two Israelis, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, are the credited directors of “No Other Land.” Adra and Abraham are also two of the film’s main subjects. Adra grew up in Masafer Yatta, with parents who taught him to protest, and has filmed the destruction of his peoples’ homes for years. Abraham is a journalist based in Jerusalem, who makes repeated trips to Masafer Yatta to cover what’s happening — and to convince his Israeli editors that the story is worth pursuing.

The filmmakers make their feelings about the conflict quite clear — and whether a viewer agrees or disagrees is probably determined by one’s views of the Middle East as a whole. The Palestinians shown here are desperate, unable to win in court or in the field, risking arrest from Israeli soldiers and violence from Israeli settlers. The filmmakers depict the soldiers as rigid, their civilian leaders as uncaring and callous, and the settlers as a mob.

It’s important to note that filming for “No Other Land” started in the winter of 2019, and ended in the fall of 2023, just before the attacks by Hamas militants that killed some 1,200 Israelis and prompted airstrikes and a ground offensive on Gaza that has left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead and countless numbers displaced. It’s also worth noting that some of the reasons Hamas gave for mounting their attacks — Israeli raids in the West Bank, attacks by settlers against Palestinians, and expansion of Jewish settlements on occupied lands — are the things chronicled in this film.

Does what the filmmakers show justify Hamas’ attacks? Of course not, and most everyone would say “no” — just as many would say the ferocity of the Israeli military in Gaza isn’t justified by what Hamas did. I, like the majority of Americans, don’t know enough about the long history of Israelis and Palestinians to express anything but a naive hope that a solution can be found without violence from either side.

I can also hope — again, naively — that more Americans can seek out information about this intractable conflict, including watching “No Other Land.” The movie, though it has won awards at festivals and is nominated for an Academy Award, does not have a U.S. distributor. According to The New York Times, the filmmakers are self-distributing the movie to 23 cities, including Salt Lake City, with plans of a larger rollout. Here’s hoping as many people as possible will see it.

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‘No Other Land’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 21, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violence and language. Running time: 92 minutes; in Arabic and Hebrew, with subtitles.