Global Courant 2023-04-14 13:00:31
Despite recent debate, it is true that film criticism serves a variety of purposes beyond predicting how successful a film will be. But if you just want to know if you’ll really like Renfield, there’s a pretty simple test.
Ask yourself: can you handle it the “Full Cage?”
Answer that — whether you’re able to resist a Nicolas Cage performance without restraint — and you won’t have to bother sticking around for reviews of his new Dracula-inspired spatter comedy. Because when it comes to the audience’s reception of Cage’s library, there are basically two kinds of people: those who can’t get enough of it, and those who can’t get out of the theater fast enough.
Cage’s Count Dracula isn’t Renfield’s protagonist, but the film still displays all the campy, manic energy you’d expect from the cinematic universe featuring everything from Mom and Dad to Con Air and The Wicker Man. It’s an off-the-wall murder fest with enough beheadings, Kool-Aid colored blood, and literal piles of corpses to threaten Hobo with a shotgun. It’s a trope-heavy, elaborate “what-if” exercise that relies so heavily on genre stereotypes and formulas that it gives the look of an elaborate SNL sketch.
It’s silly, youthful, full of overwrought performances and – if you’re willing to go along with it – hilarious, self-aware and downright fun.
Because Renfield largely knows exactly what it is. Like this year’s M3GAN, or last year’s Jackass Forever, it equips itself with whatever criticism would normally be thrown at it, and makes it its own. So if you’re the type to stand up and cheer at Face/Off’s Hallelujah scene, you get it. If not, Renfield is probably not for you.
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Servant in the spotlight
That’s not to say that everything works perfectly – far from it. Building on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Renfield elevates the titular assistant from minor character to protagonist, while retaining his status as Dracula’s servant and “trusted.”
As in the novel, Robert Montague Renfield (played here by Nicholas Hoult) is tasked with finding victims and performing all the daily tasks a Prince of Darkness could require – while drawing his superhuman strength from regularly eating any insect that might cross its path. .
From there, the similarities are usually just an occasional tongue-in-cheek reference. Renfield and Dracula are transported from the original 19th century Trannsylvania setting to modern New Orleans, and their relationship to each other is explored as just that: a relationship.
After an introduction directly satirizing Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, we meet Renfield in a support group for people who are in a relationship with a manipulative narcissist and are looking for a way out. And while the reluctant villain Renfield really tries to get out from under Dracula’s heel, he also does his best Dexter impression – bringing the same narcissistic manipulators the group complains about right to Dracula as food, instead of the innocent “busload of cheerleaders”. he asks.
What follows is a madcap gory adventure of a buddy cop, in which Renfield teams up with disgruntled detective Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina) who happens to be determined to avenge her father’s death at the hands of a drug-dealing criminal syndicate.
Hoult, left, and Awkwafina as Rebecca Quincy, pictured after reluctantly teaming up in the blood-filled spatter comedy. (Universal images)
In on the joke
It’s a messy lock of competing stories with a clumsy, almost lazy way of introducing background. Renfield lists his wishes and fears through voice-over exposition that comes in when the plot needs a push. First Rebecca’s boss, then sister awkwardly explains her motivations straight to her face – a sketch of a character backstory essentially taken straight out of Rush Hour 2. And mother/son criminal scions Bellafrancesca and Teddy Lobo (Shohreh Aghdashloo, Ben Schwartz) go so arch with unexplained villains, you half expect them to drop their many, many guns to perform their very own Disney villain ballad.
But again, Renfield isn’t trying to fit the same rubric as Citizen Kane. Giving Renfield bug-driven, Jackie Chan-inspired martial arts skills is a joke in itself. Dracula sipping a martini glass full of blood (full of more eyeballs than would make sense, even if they were olives) is fully aware of how ridiculous he looks. And by the time the head of the third or fourth nameless goon is literally kicked off his body and through a plate glass window, you should be picking up on what Renfield is going for.
Because the canned jokes and borderline millennial humor might feel like a 90 minute skit, but that’s the point. Renfield’s immature humor and deep-unless-you-think-about-it message of self-acceptance works because it’s so hard to lean in. – and that was so good it gets a sequel.
Even still, the performances elevate Renfield beyond just a blown-up improv scene. Hoult shows his potential as a leading man with an awe-inspiring appearance and, above all, funny lines. At the same time, he cements a curious Daniel Radcliffe-esque career arc – graduated from mainstream childhood success (About a Boy) to some of the most bizarre role choices imaginable (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Great and – with a certain uncanny resemblance to Renfield – Warm Bodies.)
Elsewhere, Schwartz’s Lobo is hilariously, maniacally sociopathic in a way that mirrors his early appearances in Jake & Amir. And Cage’s Captain Jack Sparrow-adjacent interpretation of Dracula would be any other actor to give eleven out of ten. For Cage, though, it’s almost tastefully understated – at least considering his previous turn as a vampire Vampire’s Kiss from 1988.
Ben Schwartz as villain Teddy Lobo in a Renfield promotional image. Lobo and his criminal syndicate head to a local club where they confront Quincy before engaging in a bloody battle with Renfield (Universal Pictures)
The only partial dud is Awkwafina: having done no favors by her character’s almost incredibly bland writing, Renfield cuts the joke when it focuses on that. Instead of making fun of and exploiting overused jokes and archetypes, Quincy’s contrived cop storyline just gets real – and tiresomely – unoriginal.
But in the end it all comes together. And despite divided reviews and less than thrilling box office predictionsRenfield will likely do what any Full Cage movie can (or perhaps be cursed): fail in the theaters, before being resurrected as a cult favorite.
