"Renfield" is a comedy about Dracula's famous minion, Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), who has survived along with his famous master to the present day, where he's joined a support group for codependents trying to get out from under the thumb of the narcissistic people in their lives. After a century of doing the bidding of Dracula (Nicolas Cage) - including finding victims for him while he recuperates from his last skirmish with holy men - Renfield wants out. In the process, he's also going to make friends with Rebecca (Awkwafina), a local cop, who is trying to bring down the Lobo criminal organization, headed by the unscrupulous Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her slimy son Teddy (Ben Schwartz).
There are a lot of good ideas in "Renfield." Nicolas Cage getting his ham on as the Prince of Darkness is a very good idea, and practically worth the cost of the ticket alone. Nicholas Hoult is also a good choice for Renfield, managing a good mix of pathetic reprobate, wounded puppy, and cheerfully violent maniac. I even like Awkwafina in the role of the cop love interest, whose aggressive comic sensibility actually works to her advantage in the part. If you know your vampire lore, "Renfield" brings back all the old hits, from Dracula having mesmerism and transformation powers, to the rules about vampires having to be invited in, to Renfield's powers being activated only when he consumes live insects.
As a film nerd, I love that this movie is set up as a direct sequel to the 1931 "Dracula" starring Bela Lugosi. We even get a few famous scenes from "Dracula" replayed, but with Cage and Hoult digitally inserted. And as an action nerd, I appreciate the sheer absurdity of the fight sequences. This is the kind of movie where Dracula and Renfield are so overpowered, they can literally rip limbs off their opponents, and turn them into an explosion of gore with a punch. This is the bloodiest studio film I've seen in a long while, but the violence isn't really horrific because it's so cartoonishly over-the-top. Combined with the gross-out factor of the bug-eating, and Dracula looking particularly nasty during the early parts of the film while he's in recovery, "Renfield" has a good chance of making you wince and squirm.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of time taken up by the tepid subplot with the police and the Lobo organization. This is clearly just a way to generate cannon fodder for the vampiric shenanigans, but it's handled pretty poorly, and a lot of scenes fall flat. Frankly, any scene without Hoult or Cage just couldn't hold my interest. And Hoult and Cage work so well together onscreen, it's a shame that most of the film is about Renfield avoiding Dracula. The interesting parts of the movie are the character interactions, and as fun as the fights are, you could have taken a lot of them out. There are indications that the film originally looked very different, with major scenes ending up on the cutting room floor, including some kind of musical number with dancing bugs.
"Renfield" is a lot of fun, but not as fun as it could have been. It feels like there were a lot of compromises made behind the scenes, and this is the version that everybody could agree on, but wasn't quite what anybody wanted. A lot of this material is already very familiar thanks to "What We Do in the Shadows," and while Nicolas Cage goes full Nicolas Cage, it's not for nearly long enough. A couple more drafts, a few tweaks here and there, and this would have been a much better movie. It's fine for what it is right now, but I'll be fast forwarding through at least half of the running time on any rewatches.
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