We’re in the thick of an ongoing movie star crisis and it’s one that no amount of “Glen Powell grinning on a red carpet” images can easily fix. His rise might have been a rare spot of good news on that front but it’s otherwise been a rough period for the emergence of true, crowd-drawing leads, a problem across many genres that’s recently been felt most in the action sphere. The last year has seen Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Henry Cavill, Bill Skarsgård, Dev Patel and, last month, Ke Huy Quan face a mixture of critical shrugs and audience lack of interest (Love Hurts in particular, bombing with $15m globally and an 18% RT rating) while those more established, such as Gerard Butler, Keanu Reeves and Jason Statham, have continued to dominate.
Ahead of Ana de Armas and Rami Malek trying their luck, here comes nepo baby done good Jack Quaid in Novocaine, the son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid fresh off the patchy sci-fi comedy Companion. That film saw him riff on his Scream persona – toxic bro doing nice guy cosplay – while here he’s closer to Amazon’s The Boys – nerdy guy doing action hero cosplay – and, again, he’s better than the material. But his charm still isn’t enough to power us through another quippy and egregiously thin little lark, hinged on a one-joke premise that stops being funny far too soon.
