There’s a kind of Sisyphean struggle at hand when one tries to write a review of a full-length feature, trying to cover all of its different facets and quirks and positives and negatives, when a whole host of one’s readers want a single question answered, and the rest is just gravy. So, in the interest of brevity: Nicolas Cage is fucking great in Chris McKay’s Renfield, and more than lives up to the promise of its billing. It’s Cage as Dracula, in which he channels six or seven iterations of the character’s screen appearances while he manages to make the role his own. It’s a gloriously goofy role for our best genre-film actor, and he seizes the moment to make something genuinely memorable. He’s amiably paired up with Nicholas Hoult, as the wormy character the film’s named after, whose brand of wide-eyed naivety and earnestness pairs well with Cage’s sarcastic depravity, and the rapport the two develop is the movie’s strongest thread. The problem is that there’s just not enough of it.
See, Renfield is Dracula’s familiar — the moron who traded his life away for servitude in exchange for some vague superpowers (which only take effect when he eats an insect) and an extended lifespan. In short, he collects the bodies for his master to feed on, and the purer the soul, the better, given that Dracula’s near-limitless powers mean that he may one day rule the world, and the faster that day comes, the faster Renfield gets his position of power. But his master is an unhinged narcissist, who has a bad habit of getting powerful and then getting himself fucked up by the church or some other vampire-hunting organization. All that progress is wasted, with Renfield taking the brunt of his anger as the monster heals from his wounds. After being chased out of city after city, the pair wind up in New Orleans, and with what little free time he has, Renfield begins attending a codependency self-help group. It’s there that he begins to think differently about his life and his position, and a chance encounter with Teddy (Ben Schwartz), a powerful crime lord’s son, attracts a pretty decent amount of attention.
After murdering a bunch of coke-thieving losers (and the burly hitman sent to kill them), Renfield finds himself in the middle of a war between the crime syndicate and Rebecca (Awkwadina), the city’s last honest cop. She wants nothing more than to take this family down, given that they murdered her father, a former police captain, but she has a bad knack for getting in her own way, and with the resources that they have, any small fuck-up results in the perp walking, no matter even if they have them dead-to-rights. This irritates her sister, an FBI agent, to no end, as well as Rebecca’s superiors, all of whom just want her to do her job at the DUI checkpoint instead of trying to play hero cop. Her latest antics — arresting a fleeing Teddy after he speeds through her checkpoint trying to get away from Renfield — have put her in the mob’s crosshairs, and the familiar, inspired by the cop’s courage, helps save her life. It’s then that he internalizes the lessons he’s learned from group and attempts to make changes to his relationship with the Dark Lord, and very nearly fucks everything up by putting Dracula in close proximity to soulless crooks more than willing to sell their services to a powerful creature of the night. Together, the two have to stop the mob and the goddamned vampire, which is a hard task unless you’ve got pluck and super-strength on your side. Which, fortunately, they do.
Renfield suffers from a disease somewhat endemic to modern comedy, which is that, in its desperation to try and outrace the limits of its high-concept premise, it overcomplicates everything. McKay yadda-yaddas away what might have been the meat of another film — you know, all of those years that the familiar spent with an immortal and immoral blood-hungry sociopath — in a single montage before feinting and faking his way through another interesting premise (Renfield using the toxic others in his support group’s lives as a food source for his master) on the way to his cure-all for these imaginative woes. Unfortunately, it’s a remedy that might have been cool in another movie — how could Dracula assisting a bunch of narco-styled Louisiana mobsters be this boring? — told in a strangely anemic and flippant way, almost as if he knows this horseshit really wasn’t why anybody paid to see this feature in the first place. Every second we spend with Awkwafina as she tries to avenge her dad’s death by taking down the mob is an ill-spent one, and it’s when the comedy is at its tinniest, where the rule is MCU-styled banter compared to the exceptions whenever Cage and Hoult share the screen together.
But at least the film isn’t wholly comprised of witless banter and lame crime film cliche, and when he’s freed from those modern-comedy obligations, McKay actually has a lot of fun with the material. The make-up effects are often fantastic: There’s one moment, set in Dracula’s would-be throne room at the heart of an abandoned hospital, where the half-dead vampire castigates his servant amidst a backdrop of slowly-emptying blood bags. Cage’s makeup can only be described as lichenous, with its craggy charred skin and exposed bone rendered in gory detail, and this ethos carries over into other facets. The action is cartoonishly gory, feeling at times if McKay had hired a Japanese splatter master to do second-unit work for him. Severed arms become projectile weapons, heads are whipped around like fastballs, and even a take on the Mortal Kombat x-ray vision is deployed during one particularly memorable kill. But it’s all window-dressing for the film’s true centerpiece, which is that glorious Cage performance — a perfect dovetailing of the actor’s sensibilities in the most recent phase of his career. Trying to pretend otherwise is folly, and it’s a bummer that Renfield spends so much time away from its Dracula. What a crappy familiar.