Steve Martin in "Novocaine."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a: Stars: Steve Martin, Laura Dern and Helena Bonham Carter Director: David Atkins Rated: R, with violence, sexuality, language and drug content Length: 95 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Marshall Fine
Gannett News Service

(November 16, 2001) -- Novocaine can't make up its mind what it wants to be: a thriller? A comedy? A Steve Martin comedy?

Actually, Martin is in straight-man mode here, playing a strait-laced dentist who gets caught up in something unanticipated and dangerous. It's obvious that writer-director David Atkins hoped to capitalize on Martin's implicit sense of irony to lift this alternately inventive and forced material.

Martin plays Frank Sangster, a dentist with a thriving practice. He's also engaged to his uptight office manager, Jean (Laura Dern). But he finds himself thinking about other women and wondering if there isn't more in life than the safe little corner he has carved out for himself.

"Don't you ever break the rules?" someone asks him. But as he notes earlier, "One small lie and everything unravels from there." He gets a chance to find out for himself when he treats an emergency patient, Susan (Helena Bonham Carter), who tries to butter him up to get a prescription for painkillers. He lets his attraction cloud his professional judgment just enough to give her a few tablets.

Before he knows it, she has forged a much larger number of pills on the slip, which triggers an investigation into his drug stocks by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The only thing he's really done is to succumb to temptation by a patient. But Frank finds himself a suspect in a murder, wanted for drug trafficking, and the victim of an elaborate plot by the people he trusts most.

Why he trusts them is another matter, one that Atkins didn't give much thought to, apparently. That's particularly true of the character of Frank's ne'er-do-well brother Harlan (Elias Koteas); you only need a glimpse of Harlan to know that he's up to no good.

Comedy and thrillers share a need for continual surprises for the audience, but those surprises have to have a dramatic logic that Novocaine rarely achieves. The various elements of this plot seem grafted together, like one of those impromptu machines on Junkyard Wars: amusing, occasionally clever, but it only goes so far.

Given a better script, Martin could wring humor out of his uptight nerd with dirty dreams. Instead, he spends most of his time looking miffed. Petulance isn't the quality you want in a hero caught up in a life-and-death struggle.

Novocaine hopes its odd juxtapositions of tones and characters will strike sparks that will ignite a screenplay.

But it never does, moving forward only by fits and starts instead of taking on the escape velocity the best thrillers achieve.