Certificate: 15 (strong bloody violence, gore, language, drug misuse)
Running Time: 93 mins
UK Distributor: Universal
WHO’S IN IT?
Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, Adrian Martinez, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Bess Rous, James Moses Black, Caroline Williams, Brandon Scott Jones, Miles Doleac
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Chris McKay (director, producer), Ryan Ridley (writer), David Alpert, Bryan Furst, Sean Furst and Robert Kirkman (producers), Marco Beltrami (composer), Mitchell Amundsen (cinematographer), Ryan Folsey, Giancarlo Ganziano and Mako Kamitsuna (editors)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Renfield (Hoult), the long-suffering assistant to Count Dracula (Cage), seeks a way out of his servitude…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON RENFIELD?
Let’s get what we all know to be true out of the way first: Nicolas Cage playing Count Dracula is the best part of Renfield. The actor has made it no secret in the past that playing Bram Stoker’s classic Transylvanian vampire on-screen would be a major lifetime achievement, and he finally gets to do so here in all the ways you’d expect the ever-eccentric Cage to play it, from chewing on every available piece of scenery, to the perfectly imbalanced speaking patterns he often brings to roles, to looking as though he’s enjoying every second in front of the camera. If there’s one reason to see this movie, it’s to witness Nicolas Cage go full Nicolas Cage in a role that was practically constructed just for him.
Unfortunately, Cage isn’t meant to be the main attraction of Renfield – he’s even designated the “and” credit during the closing titles – and whenever he isn’t livening up the screen, which sadly is more common than isn’t, the movie is left to simply chase its own tail for ninety-three minutes, lost in a confused script that contains intriguing ideas but no idea of the best ways to actually communicate them.
The film concerns Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), a British real estate agent sometime in the 1800s who, upon visiting the castle of Cage’s Dracula in Transylvania, quickly becomes the vampire’s familiar, responsible for gathering human flesh for his master to feed on. However, their relationship is clearly abusive, with the ancient bloodsucker easily manipulating the weak-willed Renfield into servitude, which continues up to the present day, where both of them have relocated to the city of New Orleans to hide out. There, Renfield comes across a support group for people in similarly toxic co-dependent relationships, and although he’s initially there to find and abduct their abusers for Dracula to feast upon, he begins to realise that he is deserving of a far better existence away from his master and seeks to rid himself of the dreaded vampire once and for all.
If the movie was just that, then perhaps it would have been a pretty decent and focused character-based comedy with the occasional bit of supernatural horror. However, a lot of that is forced to take a big step back in favour of another, much more convoluted plot involving Awkwafina as Rebecca, a traffic cop seeking to avenge her father who was killed at the hands of a powerful crime syndicate, led by matriarch Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her incompetent son Teddy (Ben Schwartz) who have an obscene control over the New Orleans crime wave and the corrupt police precincts. It’s as though a completely different movie – and not a particularly great one, either – has crashed straight into the one that we should be watching, and it can be jarring when these two strands collide because it feels as though they were separate scripts that somehow fused together, and quite awkwardly so at points, with so much of the focus going into the mobster plot that after a while it’s easy to forget that Count Dracula is also here.
It’s hard to know if writer Ryan Ridley – whose script is derived from a story by The Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman, and brought to the screen by Robot Chicken and The LEGO Batman Movie director Chris McKay – originally intended for his vampire-heavy treatment to suddenly shift to a police procedural template every now and then, or if it was a case of incorporating elements from a past unproduced screenplay of his to spice up the plot, but either way the results are disappointingly uneven. The stuff between Dracula and Renfield is genuinely interesting and at times quite amusing, since both Hoult and especially Cage are extremely dedicated to the material and are easy to root for and against respectively, and the idea of this servant to the most feared vampire of all time learning to stand up to his horribly narcissistic boss is a fresh and thoughtful one that sometimes makes for some decent dark comedy. On the other hand, all the stuff with Awkwafina’s character and these exceedingly ridiculous gangsters, most notably Ben Schwartz as the world’s most unsubtle criminal (to a point where he proudly announced his criminal identity to just about anyone, whether they asked for it or not) is often more cartoonish and over-the-top than the actual on-screen vampire, and strains for credibility even in a wacky and overblown comedy like this.
Ironically, these two wildly mismatched plots are exactly like Renfield and Dracula in this movie; individually they have some things to offer the world – it just so happens that one has better intentions than the other – but together they make for a wildly unsuitable duo. One is having fun with the classic Dracula lore as well as some decent action sequences with Tarantino levels of blood-squirting gore (though if you want to see a much more solid horror with comedy elements and outstanding practical effects, wait until Evil Dead Rise comes out next week), while the other simply follows a been-there-done-that-got-the-T-shirt crime thriller formula with few surprises and even fewer laughs. These are just two things that really shouldn’t have been put together, as the film seriously drags under the weight of trying to do too much at once, when really one or the other would have been more than enough.
Renfield is disappointing in that regard, because it is something that could have been a lot of fun, especially with someone as infamously over-the-top as Nicolas Cage playing one of the world’s greatest monsters, but it’s weighed down by its own uncertainly with what it really wants to be, to where you end up not caring all that much about either of its radically different directions. Had there been a much tighter focus on what the movie should be about, then it might have had a better chance, but as the uneven mix that it is, it’s not worth sinking your teeth all the way into – and that shouldn’t be something one has to say about a film where Nicolas Cage plays Count Dracula.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Renfield is a disappointingly unfocused horror-comedy that regularly sees its intriguing central concept, featuring a hugely entertaining turn by Nicolas Cage as Count Dracula, interrupted by a much less interesting crime thriller plot, and the two of them form an awkward mix that prevents it from being as consistently fun as it should be.
