renfield

The redemptive ballad of Nicolas Cage has been quietly percolating for some time now. The combination of the former Oscar winner’s infamously loopy and increasingly unhinged method acting and his rapid descent into straight-to-DVD oblivion made him an easy punchline… but even at his nadir, he remained that rare movie star who possesses a truly distinctive stamp. Recent years have seen several noteworthy titles rise above the flotsam - Mandy, Color Out of Space, Prisoners of the Ghostland, Pig… the sort of movies that, even if they don’t entirely work, at least hum invitingly with a genuine cinematic pulse. They proved, if nothing else, that Cage’s career - while badly winged - was far from terminal.

Renfield - arriving one year after the enjoyable meta-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent - continues Cage’s… well, if not exactly a renaissance, then at least a cautiously curated re-entry into the high society of theatrical features. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know that Cage plays Count Dracula (cue him running across the screen in Vampire’s Kiss, shrieking “I’m a vampire! I’m a vampire!”)… and Nicholas Hoult is his long-suffering familiar Robert Montague Renfield, framed as the victim of a toxic working relationship. There’s not really a whole lot to the movie beyond that comedic conceit. Renfield relocates to New Orleans after a close-shave with some vampire hunters in Europe, so that the grievously injured Count can recuperate, and ends up joining a co-dependency support group (part of the joke is that he targets their abusers as potential victims for Dracula to feed on, in order to minimize his guilt). But when he inadvertently comes to the aid of crusading cop Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina) after she’s targeted by the notorious Lobo crime family (consuming bugs gives him a temporary surge of supernatural power, like a 5-Hour Energy shot), he begins to seriously contemplate what a life of normalcy might look like.

Renfield is fun, though basic; it never really evolves beyond the more obvious contours of its tongue-in-cheek premise. There are some clever flourishes for sure - such as flashbacks that are staged as spot-on, black-and-white recreations of Tod Browning’s original 1931 Dracula (with Cage bearing a rather uncanny resemblance to Bela Lugosi)… or Renfield being forced to chug a neighboring child’s ant farm when in desperate need of an immediate combat boost. This sort of material seems like a far better fit for director Chris McKay (The Lego Batman Movie) than Amazon’s indifferent facsimile of a mega-budget tentpole, The Tomorrow War (which felt like it was assembled in a cinematic 3D printer). But this is also a movie that tends to confuse the joke; it mistakes absurdist carnage (Renfield tears limbs clean off and paints the screen with fountains of CGI plasma) as a substitute for actual humor to a degree that starts to feel wearisome. A little bloodletting goes a long way - after a while its coppery taint simply becomes a numbing agent.​

Cage is obviously having a ball… but the prospect of him playing Count Dracula was such a hammy delight, people started laughing the moment his casting was announced (and continued when the trailer debuted) - by the time he appears, leering with bug-eyed menace and rasping each line of dialogue with evil relish, the joke almost feels played-out. His screentime is relatively limited anyway… it’s on the rest of the cast to do the heavy lifting (including Shohreh Aghdashloo, whose smoky purr is put to good use as the head of the Lobo family, and Ben Schwartz as her nitwitted son). Awkwafina may be dialed down a touch, but her idiosyncratic comedic energy still has its own tangy buzz - Hollywood continues to circle her warily, like a plutonium reactor, trying to figure out the best way to harness her unique power. She and Hoult are mismatched in the best possible way; their weirdly unorthodox chemistry gives the film an extra bounce whenever its edge threatens to dull. Hoult, fusing frayed nerves and pale, Burton-esque styling with the fidgety Englishness of early Hugh Grant, was a great choice for the title character. With an ensemble cast this marvelously eclectic, it’s too bad the end result is merely and acceptably amusing, rather than a dizzyingly euphoric rush of blood to the head.