Renfield Sucks

I had forgotten that sometimes Nicolas Cage makes movies that are not good.

I had forgotten this part. 

Silly me, I honestly had forgotten this part. 

It’s been so long since I’ve gone to a movie theater to see the new Nicolas Cage movie and been disappointed that I plum forgot that the reason that the Oscar-winning eccentric and scion of the legendary acting and filmmaking clan is infamous for making a lot of terrible movies that flop at the box-office is because he makes a lot of terrible movies that flop at the box-office. 

I was so overjoyed that Cage’s movies were making it to the multiplexes again after a long, long ramble in the wilderness of RedBox and direct-to-streaming that it did not occur to me that Cage’s comeback movies might suck harder than Cage’s debauched Count Dracula at the neck of a virginal high school cheerleader. 

I foolishly assumed that if Cage was going to be in a movie it must be good and he must have really connected with the role in a profound spiritual and creative way when I have spent YEARS marveling at the perverse randomness and famously inexplicable judgment that characterizes Cage’s career and choice of roles, particularly over the past twenty years or so for the Travolta/Cage podcast and the Travolta/Cage Project at my website, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place.  

So it brings me no joy to have to report that Renfield, Cage’s big re-teaming with Nicholas Hoult, who he legendarily made The Weatherman with all those years ago, fundamentally does not work. At all. In the least. Not a bit. I sat there the whole time thinking, “Stupid movie! Be funnier!”

Renfield is a stinker of maddening and complete miscalculation, a tonal mess that feels like four or five under-whelming movies desperately joined together with duct tape and delusional hope. 

I came for a movie about Nicolas Cage’s Count Dracula. I ended up with a half-assed Awkwafina vehicle about a haunted young policewoman trying to work through formative family trauma. 

I recently rewatched The Weatherman and was even more blown away by it. It’s a movie that knows exactly what it wants to say and how to say it whereas all the stars in Renfield seem to be acting in different movies in different genres with different tones and different points of view. 

Renfield is so thoroughly misguided that it’s hard to know where to even begin with its massive miscalculations. So let’s start with its decision to essentially make its title character a superhero with all manner of super powers who gets all his mojo from eating insects. You know how Popeye is with spinach? That’s Renfield and insects here. 

It’s as if the screenwriters realize that the general public pretty much only know the following two things about Renfield:

1. He’s Count Dracula’s hypnotized and controlled manservant 

2. Like Nicolas Cage on the set of Vampire’s Kiss, he’s got a thing for eating bugs. 

The big difference is that when Cage ate a cockroach to get into character for 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss, a vampire comedy that is as brilliant and pure as this is hackneyed and compromised, it was in service of great art. 

When Renfield noshes on ants and spiders and various creepy crawlies and instantly gains the ability to do Mortal Kombat fatalities, complete with beating people to death with their own limbs, it just feels silly and lame. 

Yet Renfield clings to this terrible idea all the same because it gives its titular anti-hero crazy violent hard R rated super-powers and superheroes and gratuitous bloodshed are all the rage with kids these days. 

If you’ve seen Renfield’s advertising then you’re aware that it prominently involves Renfield being in group therapy for co-dependent relationships. Renfield labors under the delusion that this is hilarious premise for a movie. In actuality, it’s an okay idea for a five minute long Funny or Die sketch. 

A movie that stubbornly refuses to work on any level, Renfield cast Hoult as a modern-day Renfield who really wants to get away from what he knows damn well is a toxic and unhealthy relationship with an employer who treats him like a literal slave of the damned but has trouble severing ties on account of Count Dracula being a figure of supreme evil and power with the hypnosis and the blood sucking and being immoral and tearing skin off and everything. 

Renfield’s trailer makes it look like a student of what I like to call the “Well that happened” school of comedy, where characters respond with deadpan understatement to fantastical developments that seemingly would blow the minds of all but the most jaded observers. 

For some reason I associate Joss Wedon with with “Well that happened” style of mirth-making, particularly his superhero work. 

In Renfield, the fantastical developments Renfield and Rebecca (Awkwafina) encounter and are “comically” underwhelmed by is Renfield working for THE Count Dracula and having the aforementioned Mortal Kombat fatality superpower every time he powers up with some juicy insect. 

Like pretty much everything else in the film, this is never funny but the movie goes with it all the same, because it is deeply committed to throwing everything against the proverbial wall and trying not to be too discouraged when nothing sticks. 

Much of Renfield sounds like it should work on paper but proves deadly onscreen, like the outside the box casting of the normally hilarious Ben Schwartz, of Parks and Recreation and Sonic the Hedgehog fame, as Teddy Lobo, a coked-up mob enforcer and member of a prominent crime family. 

The incongruity of Schwartz in a role like that should be, at the very least, mildly amusing. It’s not. It just feels like a weird mistake that handcuffs a talented comic character actor and improviser by giving him a role that does not allow him to do anything funny or interesting. 

The same is true, unfortunately and inexplicably, of Cage. Cage delivers a perversely straightforward take on Count Dracula as an oddly charmless monster of insatiable evil. 

When Nicolas Cage playing Count Dracula in a silly, CGI-heavy horror comedy isn’t having any fun and isn’t any fun then something has gone horribly awry and Cage’s performance seems to belong in a different, much darker and less comic movie. 

Renfield’s biggest problem, beyond the whole bug thing, might just be the surreal lack of chemistry between Count Dracula and Renfield. Cage is just so damn unpleasant and non-seductive that it’s hard to see what Renfield sees him in, beyond, you know, the whole becoming immortal and hypnosis. 

That STILL does not seem enough. Hoult is a lovely young man with an appealing presence. He unfortunately has not been giving a character to play, just the vague idea of a character—Renfield in therapy—that he doesn’t quite know what to do with, particularly where his relationship with his boss is concerned. 

Hoult has equally limp chemistry with Akwafina, who doesn’t seem to know why she’s the actual star of the Nicolas Cage Dracula movie while Nicolas Cage is but a mere supporting player anymore than I do. 

I don’t know why I expected Renfield to be good. Its trailers made it seem like it could go either way; it could be a goofy, over-achieving 21 Jump Street/The Lego Movie delight or it could be another hard whiff in its star’s extremely uneven filmography. 

Renfield, unfortunately, just kind of sucks. It doesn’t even have the decency to be bad in a particularly interesting or distinctive way. It’s just a big, empty CGI fantasy that wants to be a crowd-pleaser but instead disappoints. 

I really wanted this to be good and to enjoy my night out watching the new Nicolas Cage movie but Renfield fucking sucks. 

One and a Half Star