"Swarm" and "The Swarm"

Don't you love it when two completely different shows are released almost at the same time, with close to the same title?

Amazon's "Swarm" is the brainchild of Donald Glover and Janine Nabers, and occasionally feels like a spinoff of "Atlanta."  It has the same mix of psychological thriller, dark satire, and existential dread found in some of their more adventurous episodes.  Our protagonist is a troubled young woman named Dre (Dominique Fishback) whose one passion is being a fan of a pop artist named Ni'jah (Nirine S. Brown).  After the death of her sister Marissa (Chloe Bailey), who the online rumor mill suspect may have killed herself over the new Ni'jah album, Dre chooses violence and embraces her terrifying dark side.

Each episode starts with a spin on the famous "Fargo" disclaimer, cautioning viewers that "Swarm" is based on real events, and any similarities to the real people involved are intentional.  Ni'Jah is clearly modeled on an iconic singer with a notoriously fervent fanbase, and many of the events we see in "Swarm" are taken from real life - or at least the rumors of what might have happened in real life.  The show probably works better if you're familiar with the drama in question, though it was fun for me to go back after watching "Swarm," and dig into the real world influences and connections.  

"Swarm" follows Dre through several years and several stages of her life, and feels like an anthology at times.  Even if you assume that Dre is an unreliable narrator, the way things unfold is too outlandish to be taken at face value, so I don't think it really works as a thriller.  However, the commentary is sharp and there are some good laughs to be had.  Also, Dominique Fishback's performance is excellent throughout.  If "Swarm" gets anything right, it's the portrayal of Dre's sad existence as an obsessed superfan, constantly attached to her phone, and using her love of Ni'Jah to compensate for other parts of her life.  The show is tragic, horrific, and sometimes a deeply uncomfortable watch.  And yet, it's so well made that I marathoned the whole thing in two sittings.     

Now, for something completely different.  "The Swarm" is an ambitious German science-fiction series that is mostly English language, featuring an international cast playing scientists from around the world.  The show is about a series of crises involving marine life, including suddenly aggressive whales, plague-spreading crabs, and boat-destroying bivalves.  A pattern emerges, pointing to a possible intelligence in the deep sea that is orchestrating these disasters as attacks on coastal populations.  Like many other science fiction series this year, the changes are hypothesized to have been triggered by climate change.  

What I like about "The Swarm," which will no doubt bore or frustrate other viewers, is that in spite of the wild premise, the show spends the majority of its time foregrounding scientists and their daily struggles.  The bizarre attacks take place in the first ten minutes or last ten minutes of each episode, and the rest of the time is devoted to checking in on various doctors and professors and researchers who are the only ones with any inkling of what might really be going on.  They discuss science, struggle to cut through bureaucratic red tape, and end up in more battles over funding and organizational politics than with any supernatural activity.  This lends a nice sense of realism to the events of the first few episodes, until everything goes off the rails into supernatural chaos for the finale. It's nice to see this kind of procedural mystery, where all the characters are fairly ordinary people, cast with lots of actors I didn't recognize, with the exception of Cecile de France and Sharon Duncan-Brewster.

  

The disaster sequences are very well executed and look very expensive, which should draw in some genre fans.  However, I suspect that the show will move too slowly for most viewers.  We learn plenty about the personal lives of characters like biologist Dr. Sigur Johanson (Alexander Karim), who is struggling with whether or not to consult for a mining company, and a First Nations cetologist named Leon Anawak (Joshua Odick) with a rough past, but none of their stories really impact the larger plot and aren't very compelling in and of themselves.  I appreciate the more cerebral approach to the material, but it often feels like it's working at odds with the wild premise, and the talented ensemble seems to ever have enough screen time to really make a lasting impression.  "The Swarm" is an interesting series, but ultimately a dysfunctional one, and I doubt we'll see it continue past its first season.    

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"The Last of Us" Makes the Leap

I'm not the likely audience for the post-apocalyptic HBO series, "The Last of Us."  I'm extremely wary these days of post-apocalyptic horror media, and only made it through the first season of "The Walking Dead" before calling it quits.  "The Last of Us" is based on a highly regarded 2013 video game, with a fervent fanbase.  Famously, much of the game was motion-captured and voice-acted by professional actors, many of them now returning to cameo or play different roles in the new series.  Video and computer games have been notoriously difficult to translate to screen, with titles like "Assassin's Creed" and "Uncharted" among the latest failed attempts.  "The Last of Us" series, however, succeeds by being a very faithful adaptation of very strong material.     

"The Last of Us" is zombie media, though the culprit is technically a cordyceps fungus that evolves to be able to infect humans, take over their brains, and turn them into mindless, undead extensions of itself.  The first episode follows our main character Joel (Pedro Pascal) in the chaos of the initial outbreak, and then twenty years later, where he's eking out a sad existence as a smuggler with Tess (Anna Torv), his partner in crime.  The government has turned fascist and is constantly fighting a rebel organization, the Fireflies.  Joel and Tess work out of a quarantined zone in Boston, where they encounter a Firefly leader, Marlene (Merle Dandridge), who needs them to help transport a 14 year-old girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsay) out of danger.  Ellie is immune to the cordyceps and may be the key to a cure.

As with all stories of this type, "The Last of Us" is less about the monsters and more about how humans behave in these conditions.  The show was created by Neil Druckmann, the original writer of "The Last of Us" game, and Craig Mazin who created "Chernobyl," and they do a good job of expanding on the game's story.   With nine episodes to fill, the show has time for extended flashbacks and side stories to show us how others are surviving in this dystopia.  The episode that has attracted the most attention features a couple (Murray Bartlett and Nick Offerman) who ironically find a better life together after civilization falls apart than they had when everything was still intact.  There are also the typical run-ins with cult leaders, scavengers, and different types of communities that have formed in the twenty years since the cordyceps took over.  

Despite a fourteen year-old being one of the main characters, strong content warnings are in effect.  There's plenty of violence, including the non-graphic execution of a child in the premiere, and Ellie curses like a sailor.  This is a very dark universe, where the surviving humans are regularly committing worse atrocities than the zombies, including some of our heroes.  Major deaths are not only possible, but pretty much a given, with nearly every episode ending in someone's demise.  One of the major themes is how the heartwarming father-daughter bond that develops between Joel and Ellie inspires Joel to do some truly heinous things out of love. The visceral frights here have nothing on the existential horror of watching people's humanity erode throughout the show.    

   

Because it's HBO, the production quality is excellent.  Fans of the game will enjoy seeing some favorite sequences recreated, and the cordyceps monsters brought to horrifically tactile, fungalicious life.  However, the real upgrade is the caliber of the acting talent.  Pedro Pascal has felt a little overexposed lately, but he's making an excellent case for being our go-to everyman as Joel.  And Bella Ramsay is the exact right combination of annoying kid and burgeoning badass.  The supporting cast is also wildly overqualified, with great work from Torv, Offerman, Murray, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Shepherd, and many more.       

I put off watching the show for a while, for a myriad of reasons, but once the good notices started rolling in, I knew I'd see it eventually.  "The Last of Us" is familiar territory, and the kind of series that could have been done very poorly.  However, I knew that with the right talent and the right approach, it was also a show that had the potential to be the first great game adaptation.  And I think the jury's still out on that, but it's certainly one of the best ones to date.  Here's hoping season two can live up to what we've seen so far.  

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A "Shazam!" Sequel Autopsy

Minor spoilers ahead.

What happened to this movie?  The first "Shazam!" was one of the more memorable DCEU superhero outings, because it was one of the few that was aimed squarely at kids, and offered a lot of humor, heart, and poignancy to go with its CGI-heavy punch-em-ups.  Billy Batson, played by Asher Angel, had some genuinely interesting emotional territory to explore as a Philadelphia foster kid struggling to accept the love of a new family.  Now it's four years later, though apparently only two have passed in universe, and the "Shazam!" crew is ready for a new outing.  And it's a mess.

Clearly there was a lot going on behind the scenes of "Shazam! Fury of the Gods."  The movie actually has a lot of good things in it - a lot of the humor works, some of the ideas are fun, and foster parents Rosa and Victor (Marta Milans and Cooper Andrews) are the secret MVPs of these films.  It's good to see more of the adult versions of the kid superheroes, with Adam Brody and Meagan Good making an especially good impression.  However, the whole movie is built around two characters, and really just two actors - the adult Billy played by Zachary Levi, and Billy's best friend Freddy, played by Dylan Jack Grazer.  These two get the lion's share of the screen time in this movie, with very mixed results.  

Levi, once again, is not on the same wavelength as Asher Angel at all.  Billy is supposed to be seventeen, and Levi is playing him like a much younger, brattier kid in the body of an adult.  And having so much more screen time makes him come across as a far more obnoxious, blustering dope.  Asher has maybe five brief scenes and barely gets to do anything.  Instead, the cute teenage romance subplot goes to Freddy, who falls for the new girl at school, Anne (Rachel Zegler).  Grazer and Brody are more in sync, and pull off the body switching more seamlessly than Angel and Levi, so it makes sense why they get featured more this time out.  Grazer is clearly the best actor among the kids, and the movie ends up heaping a lot on his shoulders.  However, this makes the story feel so unbalanced, that I suspected they were setting up Freddy to take over the franchise.  Wishful thinking, maybe.

Remember the after-credits sequence of the first "Shazam" setting up a new bug villain?  Well, he's in the after-credits sequence of this movie too, setting up an appearance in another sequel that probably will never happen.  The main villains here are a couple of Greek goddesses, the daughters of Atlas, who want the Shazam powers.  Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu) steal the magic staff and menace the wizard (Djimon Honsou) into giving them information about Shazam.  How they got Helen Mirren to agree to be in this movie is a mystery, as she's utterly wasted.  Ditto Lucy Liu, but that's sadly nothing new.

 

A lot of these creative decisions, including several cameos, were reportedly due to Dwayne Johnson throwing his weight around behind the scenes.  His character, Black Adam, was supposed to be a "Shazam!" villain, but he wanted nothing to do with the "Shazam!" movies for reasons that are a mystery.  Of course, this doesn't explain why there wasn't enough time with the kids as kids, Billy's character arc was very minimal, or why there's a shameless deus ex machina ending (literally!) that made me groan.  I still think that Shazam is fun as a concept and character, but being part of the DCEU has been detrimental, and this is an installment that really didn't need to exist.

   

Still, there are some good action scenes and some good laughs to be found amidst the wreckage of an over-compromised script.  This often feels more kid-friendly than the previous Shazam movie, though there are still a few weirdly dark moments.  "Shazam! Fury of the Gods" should be fine for your basic superhero needs, but it's not remotely as good as the first, and it's a shame to see so much talent and so much potential go to waste.  This is one of the last proper DCEU movies before James Gunn takes over, and it's the fitting equivalent of a crash landing.  

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My Favorite Penny Marshall Movie

Penny Marshall is perhaps still best known as a sitcom actress, but her contributions to cinema have had far more impact over the years.  She directed mostly gentle feel-good comedies and heartfelt dramas, but through them launched several major stars to fame, including Tom Hanks with "Big" and Whoopi Goldberg with "Jumpin' Jack Flash."  She made the kind of midbudget, star vehicle comedies that haven't gotten much traction at the box office lately, and I've been feeling nostalgic for them.  However, her best film was a medical drama, "Awakenings," which represented a rare confluence of several talented players.

I saw "Awakenings" for the first time when I was very young and didn't recognize most of the actors.  It didn't strike me as odd that Robin Williams was in a serious role or that Robert DeNiro was playing a very sweet man who wouldn't hurt a fly.  All I knew was that both performances were wonderful, and the script, the second screen credit of Steven Zaillian, was very moving and maybe even profound.  The film is a lovely mix of comedy and drama, and presents a very humanist, life-affirming story about the wonder of human existence.  "Awakenings" has superficial similarities to much darker narratives like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Flowers for Algernon," but keeps its attitude positive without ever coming across as too maudlin or melodramatic.          

     

It helps that the film's visuals are so strong.  Marshall never got much attention as a visual stylist, keeping her filmmaking very simple to let the talent of her actors shine.  However, she had a knack for orchestrating some iconic visuals, like the FAO Schwartz piano scene in "Big" and Whoopi Goldberg stuck in that telephone booth in "Jumpin' Jack Flash."  Her cinematographer on "Awakenings," and for many of her subsequent films, was the celebrated Miroslav Ondricek, who shot many of Milos Forman's best films.  Early on, there's a sequence where Williams as Dr. Sayers demonstrates how a seemingly catatonic patient still has reflex responses by having them catch a baseball.  His theories are dismissed by the other doctors, but Sayers will not give up.  Soon baseballs and tennis balls are being lobbed everywhere, becoming the film's visual metaphor for Sayers' determination.  Patients are wheeled down the halls with them clutched in their frozen hands.  After seeing "Awakenings," I couldn't remember the title, the actors, or the name of the disease they were trying to cure, but I always remembered the tennis balls.    

"Awakenings" received plenty of acclaim when it was released, and the lion's share went to Robert DeNiro for his work as Leonard Lowe, a man who contracted encephalitis lethargica as a boy, and had been in a catatonic state for thirty years.  His awakening to a new reality as an adult, and his transformation from a voiceless vegetable to vibrant personality, are the impetus for a voyage of discovery.  Leonard is one of DeNiro's most charming and lovable characters, initially a boy who has suddenly found himself in a man's body, but who grows up quickly, falls in love, and eventually becomes a tragic figure.  Robin Williams' Dr. Sayers takes a backseat as the film goes on, but he's plenty compelling in his clashes with the medical establishment, and finding his own personal victories.  I like him far more here than in most of his other dramatic roles.    

It doesn't surprise me at all that Marshall eventually stopped making movies, and spent the last years of her career directing television shows like "United States of Tara."  The slower, character-based films she was best known for have largely gone out of fashion.  I think you could still make a film like "Awakenings" today, but it's a far less likely project than it would have been in 1990.  This is an adult drama that takes a more thoughtful and uplifting approach to its medical mystery subject matter than most, and is difficult to categorize.  It's not funny enough to be a comedy, not tragic enough to be a tearjerker, and far too complicated to be a feel-good film.  However, it is a film that I still think about after thirty years, and continue to hold in very high regard.  

What I've Seen - Penny Marshall

Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986)

Big (1988)

Awakenings (1990)

A League of Their Own (1992)

Renaissance Man (1994)

The Preacher's Wife (1996)

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"Creed" and "Magic Mike," Round Three

I never watched all of the "Rocky" movies, so I'm not sure where they started to go off the rails.  "Creed," however, is still going strong with its third entry, which was directed by Michael B. Jordan, and introduces a formidable new opponent in Damian "Diamond Dame" Anderson, played by Jonathan Majors.  Donnie and Dame share some history and got in trouble together in the past.  This landed Dame in prison for many years, and has left him with a serious grudge against his former friend.  Donnie retires from boxing at the beginning of the film, and is now helping to train and promote upcoming boxers like Felix Chavez (Jose Benavidez Jr.), and spending more time with his family, including young daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent).  However, when his attempts to help Dame go awry, Donnie may have to step back into the ring.  

It's been eight years since the first "Creed," and it's been thoroughly satisfying watching Donnie move through different stages of his life and relationships.  Sylvester Stallone sits out this installment, allowing Phylicia Rashad, as Donnie's mother, to be his major mentor figure here.  Despite his personal crisis in this film, there's been a lot of growth since we saw him in 2018's "Creed II."  It makes sense that he's moved into a different role, running a training academy and gym with Wood Harris's Little Duke.  And of course he's fluent in ASL with his daughter and Bianca.  And what the film gets so right is that it sets up a great troubled antagonist in Diamond Dame.  "Creed III" is a star vehicle for Jonathan Majors more than it is for Michael B. Jordan.  Majors' physical presence is so charismatic, and his performance is so well calibrated, it's impossible to keep your eyes off him.  The film works because its combatants are well matched and they play off of each other perfectly onscreen.

"Creed III," frankly, has a bare bones story that doesn't hold up to much scrutiny, but its emotional arcs are rock solid.  It's good to be in this universe with these characters and all their decades of history again.  The filmmaking is very strong, with the boxing and training sequences among the best in the entire franchise.  I like the occasional stylization, like the use of speed ramping and abstracted visuals.  Jordan is a professed anime fan, and I was expecting something far more exaggerated, but the big flourishes are rare, and the action is mostly kept pretty grounded.  I wasn't expecting much at the outset, but this is a thoroughly satisfying film on every level, and I hope Michael B. Jordan gets to direct again soon.  

Now on to "Magic Mike's Last Dance." Despite her prominence in the ad campaign, it didn't really sink in for me that Salma Hayek Pinault was the female lead of this film.  I thought her role would be closer to Jada Pinkett Smith's emcee in "Magic Mike XXL."  Instead,  Hayek Pinault is firmly the second lead of "Last Dance."  She plays Maxandra Mendoza, a wealthy socialite going through a divorce, who happens across Mike Lane, working as a bartender at a fundraiser.  One thing leads to another, and she pays him for an intimate lap dance that leads to more.  The next thing Mike knows, she's flying him to London for a secret job, which turns out to be helping her transform a stuffy play at the theater she owns into an erotic male burlesque extravaganza.   

The love story is pretty flimsy, but it stays mostly adjacent to the old "putting on a show" formula and some snazzy dance sequences.  None of the new dancers are really characters, but they display enough impressive moves to be a nice distraction.  None of Mike's fellow performers from the previous "Magic Mike" movies appear either, except in a Zoom call group cameo, which is a shame.  Instead, we have Max's precocious teen daughter Zadie (Jemelia George) and chauffeur Victor (Ayub Khan Din) keeping an eye on the progress of the show's development and Max and Mike's romance, and occasionally putting in their two cents.  Zadie's incongruously posh VO narration of the events is downright awful - one of the more perplexing choices in the film.

"Magic Mike's Last Dance" was originally supposed to be an HBO Max Original, but was one of several recent streaming projects that was given a theatrical run.  I don't think they should have bothered with this one, because everything about the film feels small and overly familiar.  It has some fine spectacle, and Tatum is able to summon up more charm than you might think, but there's nothing remotely on the level of Joe Manganiello's epic gas station number from "Magic Mike XXL."  And as much as I love Salma, I think she's been in too many inane comedies lately, because she's pitched way, way too broad for this kind of movie.  I have to respect Steven Soderbergh for sticking with this series for so long, but please let the title be accurate, and let this really be "Magic Mike's Last Dance."  

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"Tetris" and "Pinball"

There was a previous attempt to turn the beloved video game "Tetris" into a movie, roughly a decade ago.  It was supposed to be a science fiction adventure that didn't sound like it had anything to do with the actual game.  The second attempt to turn "Tetris" into a movie takes an entirely different approach, presenting a highly exaggerated version of the fight among several companies and individuals to license Tetris from its Soviet creators in the late 1980s.  Our main character, and the eventual winner, is businessman Henk Rogers (Taron Edgerton), who runs a small Japanese game company with his lovely wife Akemi (Ayane Nagabuchi).  His competitors are the billionaire Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam) and his son Kevin (Anthony Boyle), and shady licensor Robert Stein (Toby Jones).  Eventually all of them end up in the USSR together, trying to win the lucrative deal for rights.

Significant liberties are taken with actual history, as Rogers has to contend with a comically corrupt official named Trifonov (Igor Grabuzov), and eventually everything builds to a thrilling escape sequence and car chase.  However, the messiness of the business dealings and the culture clash between the Western businessmen and the Communist system feels fairly plausible and is a lot of fun to see play out.  Rogers befriends the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), and Pajitnov's plight gives the story more crucial stakes beyond the financial ones.  The portrayal of the U.S.S.R. in its decline is fairly cartoonish, but the whole story takes place during the '80s, and the Soviets were our go-to movie villains in that era, so it also feels oddly appropriate.  And it goes with the 8 bit pixel art for the film's chapter breaks, and a soundtrack full of '80s standards.  Reorchestrated versions of the Tetris theme also feature constantly, to get your nostalgia going.

I appreciate the filmmakers including some of the nerdier aspects of the story and video game history.  The unveiling of the prototype of Nintendo's Gameboy is hilariously reverent.  However, "Tetris" should still be plenty accessible for non-fans, as it's far more of a farcical biopic and stranger-than-fiction slice of history than the usual video game themed film.  I thought it was a fun watch, and Toby Jones stole the show the way he always does, but all in all pretty middling.  There was a lot more they could have done to make the story interesting beyond awkwardly adding some 8-bit graphics to the unnecessary car chase.   

     

And that brings us to "Pinball: the Man Who Saved the Game," which is a biopic of a man named Roger Sharpe, played by Mike Faist as a young man and Dennis Boutsikaris in the present day.  Sharpe came to New York in the '70s to make it as a writer, got a job at GQ Magazine, and fell in love with a single mother named Ellen (Crystal Reed).  Sharpe was also the star witness at a 1976 hearing that convinced the City of New York to lift their decades long ban on pinball, which used to be considered a game of chance, and therefore a gambling device.  Sharpe, a pinball obsessive, was able to show that it was a game of skill.

The movie's not really about the legalization fight, however, but about Roger Sharpe and his relationship to a game that he loves.  And what's absolutely irresistible about the film is that it employs a framing device where an unseen director (Jeff Yass) is interviewing the older Sharpe in the present day, and both are commenting on the dramatized past events starring the younger Sharpe.  They're constantly talking about filmmaking particulars in the process - spending too long on the love story, having to replace swear words because the movie is going to be PG-13, and no, we can't use John Lennon's "Imagine," because the song is too slow and it costs too much.  The older Sharpe does the fun trick from "American Splendor" and "American Animals" where he'll occasionally wander into the margins of a dramatized scene to offer additional commentary.  At the end, he even offers some fact-checking and an update on what happened to all the characters in real life.  This is tremendously fun to watch, and executed wonderfully.   

What really won me over in the end was Faist's performance as Sharpe, an ordinary but very specific man.  I bought his love and enthusiasm for pinball, while Edgerton's love for video games in "Tetris" seemed rather more convenient.  And I bought into his romance with Ellen, such that I really wouldn't have minded if we'd spent the whole movie on their relationship and never made it to the legalization hearing at all.  I think it helps that I wasn't expecting much from the movie, giving it the chance to overdeliver.  "Pinball" wound up being one of the best surprises of my movie year so far.    

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I Get a Kick Out of "Renfield"

"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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