Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Chris McKay
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Ben
Schwartz, Shohreh Aghdashloo
Though he had starred in movies previously, it was 1988's
Vampire's Kiss that truly established
Nicolas Cage's reputation for over the top but wildly
entertaining performances. A precursor to American Psycho, the film satirised 1980s yuppie culture with Cage playing a literary
agent who becomes convinced he's a vampire. Now Cage is playing an
actual vampire, but not just any bloodsucker – Count Dracula himself.
Director Chris McKay's Renfield gives Cage ample
opportunity to ham it up as the Count, and it's not an opportunity the
actor wastes. Whenever he's on screen you can't help but grin, even if
Cage's schtick has gotten a little stale at this point.
The trouble is, Renfield isn't about Dracula, it's about
his titular gopher, played here by Nicholas Hoult channeling Hugh
Grant. As a youngster, Hoult got his big break playing alongside Grant
in About a Boy, and it seems he was taking notes.
Renfield, which should really have been called "Dracula's Dogsbody", has a
pretty good premise. What if Renfield grew tired of living under the
thumb of his master and joined a support group for people stuck in toxic
relationships? Well, it might be a pretty good premise for a comedy
sketch but Renfield struggles to stretch this setup to
feature length, even at a mercifully short 90 minutes.
Taking its cues from 1990s vampire comedies
Innocent Blood and Vampire in Brooklyn, Renfield gets distracted with some hokum concerning
mobsters. Having spent decades roaming the world looking for victims,
Dracula and Renfield now find themselves in New Orleans, where the
latter incurs the wrath of gangster Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz) and
his mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo channeling Jessica Walter) after
accidentally disrupting a drug deal. Also on the case is local cop
Rebecca (Awkwafina), who is seemingly the only cop in the city
not being paid to look the other way by the mob.
This leads to a lot of formulaic action scenes that follow the template
established by director Matthew Vaughan in his
Kick-Ass and Kingsman franchises, i.e. loud
fast music playing over sped up, then slowed down, then sped up again
action injected with a bit of crude visual comedy.
As we watch these monotonous set-pieces unfold, we're left to mourn the
absence of Cage, who disappears completely for most of the movie. This
leaves us in the company of Hoult and Awkwafina, who form a bond that
the movie doesn't seem to know what to do with. It's mostly platonic,
with some minor flirting being all you can expect in this infamously
sexless era of Hollywood filmmaking. You can't help but wonder if the
movie is reticent to have Hoult and Awkwafina hook up because American
audiences are still uncomfortable with inter-racial relationships, or
because Chinese audiences (and censors) are equally ignorant. Why
pretend to care about diversity if you're still worried about offending
bigots in Boise and Beijing? Anyhow, their relationship is a badly
written and awkwardly played rehash of that between Eric Roberts' Marvel
Comics employee and Megan Gallagher's cop in Larry Cohen's classic
horror comedy The Ambulance.
Renfield is based on a story by
Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, not a name
you'd associate with laughs, which might explain why there are so few to
be found here. Only Cage's performance prompts a giggle or two,
especially when he's made up in heavy prosthetics to portray a half-dead
Dracula, as the script is sorely lacking in witty zingers. Some of the
bloodsucking gags are as stale as those found in the terminally unfunny
George Hamilton vehicle Love at First Bite.
The highlight for horror fans will likely be an opening segment that
inserts Cage and Hoult, Zelig-like, into scenes from Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula. With his pasty visage, Hoult is particularly convincing as the sort
of blandly handsome leading man you might find in a 1930s horror movie.
But if you've made a bad Dracula movie it's really not a good idea to
kick things off by reminding audiences of one of the best Dracula
movies.
