The box-office failure of "Novocaine" is not hard to explain. Apart from Steve Martin's excellent performance, there simply isn't another reason to recommend this picture: it has few funny moments, few surprises and almost no tension. After a relatively offbeat start, it travels to routine Hitchcock innocent-man-wrongly-accused territory, before finally arriving at a very strange and very gruesome ending. Besides, Helena Bonham Carter's miscasting throws the whole film off balance; for the plot to work we have to be willing to believe that an affluent dentist would be willing to give up his entire life (which he himself describes as "perfect") just to be with this one woman, but Carter isn't seductive or appealing enough in the role. The other supporting actors fare much better, but most of them are underused. (**)
