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88Quite apart from wringing the last molecule of vividness from his freewheeling roster of loose cannons, he brings to his direction of Martin a finesse shared by only a few of the directors who have worked with the comedian-actor.
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75A screwball film noir with a lot of medium laughs and a few great big ones,
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75A funny and constantly surprising exercise in comic tension.
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75Martin's most adventurous film in many years, may be next best thing to a quick shot of nitrous oxide.
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70Martin is marvelous; through sheer charisma, he takes over certain scenes as if no one else is there.
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63One moment it's farcical comedy, the next it's gruesome melodrama. The movie never finds the right tone.
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63Novocaine is neither funny enough to be a comedy, nor dark enough to be a true film noir. Like the drug of the title, it just kind of leaves you numb and anxious to taste the good stuff once again.
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60There are a few priceless moments, like Dr. Sangster trying to work on a patient, while removing a hot pink pair of panties from a nearby chair, and the discovery of a stuffed bunny complete with a full set of dentures on his fiance's bed.
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60Atkins has trouble keeping the tension high and the jokes rolling. Halfway through he begins tripping over the noir genre's dark rules, and in the end he veers off into a haze of romantic redemption that Billy Wilder and Nicholas Ray would have scoffed at.
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50The absurd meets the violent meets the droll, and we just watch from the outside, never having been drawn in by anything resembling believable feelings or behavior.
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50With Bonham Carter's been-there, done-that performance and a plot that spins out of control, we end up with a movie that you can't quite sink your teeth into.
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50The film is weighed down by the decision of director David Atkins to throw too much into the mix. The result is a serious problem of consistency.
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50If Novocaine fulfilled the promise of its premise and cast, it could be great. As it is, the film is sabotaged by writer-director David Atkins' failure to set a consistent tone and follow through.
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50Martin seems uncomfortable and oddly waxen (the orange Al Gore makeup doesn't help), injecting Frank with neither restless anger nor wry humor.
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50Nothing is particularly believable here, but there are still a few moments of silly, sinister fun.
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50It's too bad the movie's intriguing effect wears off (so to speak) about two-thirds through.
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42There are many things wrong with Novocaine, but the film's most gnawing pain is its clodhopper farfetchedness.
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42Drowns promising ideas in a sea of missed details and unconvincing motivations.
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40The mystery is terribly plotted and the satirical elements are limited and not very funny.
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40Given his lackluster performance, even Martin, who is no stranger to sardonic humor, seems unsure about the film's tone.
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40A Steve Martin vehicle that's not prankish or weird enough by half.
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40Starts out stylishly, and promisingly, but then coarsens into a silly parody of film noir.
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40There's a mechanical desire to work in as many outlandish twists as possible, and shallow grotesquerie quickly takes over.
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38The result is a performance that is neither funny nor empathetic, and the romance that develops between the dentist and the junkie patient is not strong enough to support the mystery.
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30Slack direction fails to touch a nerve. Martin was scarier and funnier extracting Bill Murray's molars without Novocaine in "Little Shop of Horrors." Now that was one crazy dentist.
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25Spins an unconvincing, miscast noir tale.
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20A coarse, witless and stunningly violent black comedy.
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FrankO.9