Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Brandon Scott Jones, Adrian Martinez
Intro:
… often fun but profoundly uneven …
In all of genre fiction, there are few characters as pathetic and put upon as R. M. Renfield. Often shown as a glassy-eyed, bug-eating lunatic, ol’ mate performed duties like house cleaning, location scouting and victim acquiring for Dracula. But is there more to the man than just being the fanged daddy’s Personal Assistant? If Chris McKay’s latest film, Renfield is to be believed, then yes, although this schlocky work doesn’t make quite as convincing a case as perhaps it could have.
Renfield tells the tale of Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), who is struggling to appease the endless, cruel demands of his extremely toxic boss Dracula (Nicolas Cage). In fact, Renny has started going to a Codependents Anonymous support group, both to find new potential victims in the form of abusive partners and talk about his own issues with likeminded people. Things come to a head when the dissatisfied Renfield saves honest copper Rebecca (Awkwafina) from coke-addled gangster Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz) and decides that maybe being a hero is a good look for him. Naturally, this displeases Dracula something fierce, and pretty soon it’s on for young and old, for 93 minutes of often fun but profoundly uneven cinema.
Renfield is one of those films that was clearly mucked about in post-production. Whether this was due to hasty reshoots due to poor test screenings or overzealous editing by chicken-hearted executives is hard to say, but the result is a film that lurches from one tonal extreme to another with little rhyme or reason. What works? Well, Nicholas Hoult is great as Renfield. A really likable performance from an actor coming into his own. Nicolas Cage is… well, it’s Cage so it’s the same fully committed but unhinged turn we expect from the man, which is both entertaining and a bit exhausting. Imagine Christopher Lee with severe head trauma and you’ll have some idea of what you’re in for. Still, it’s the first time Cage has played a blood sucker since 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss and that’s reason enough for celebration.
On the less than stellar side of things, the gangster subplot involving the great Shohreh Aghdashloo feels like something from a late ‘90s comic book adaptation, with noisy and stupid action scenes brimming with buckets of CGI blood that never seems to land on anything. This stuff is fine in small doses but gets old quickly, detracting from some of the film’s more interesting themes and ideas.
Renfield is a great premise for a horror comedy that never entirely delivers on its initial promise. A better film probably existed at some point, before it was drowned in studio notes, and it’s sad to think of the more interesting movie we’ll likely never get to see. That said, if you’re in the mood for some undemanding gory fun, bolstered by solid performances and Nicolas Cage doing his usual schtick, you’ll likely have a decent, if unspectacular time with Renfield. It’s not horror comedy royalty like Shaun of the Dead or An American Werewolf in London, but it’s better than chewing on a handful of bugs.
