Renfield: worse than Ant-Man 3?
Even a Cage-ified Nic Cage can't save this film from the misguided dreck that it is.
The squandered cinematic opportunity that is Renfield, USA, 2023, 93 mins (painful minutes) | Non-Horror, Non-Comedy, Sub-par Streaming Tier Only | Starring: the poor Nicholas Hoult, the comedically bereft Awkwafina, The overcooked Nicolas Cage, and a handful of Bozo-level actors (Ben Schwartz)| Writer: Some Poor Schmuck (Ryan Ridley and Robert Kirkman)| Director: Another Poor Schmuck (Chris McKay) | Produced & Distributed by Money Grabbing Dipsticks (Universal)
Please scroll to the bottom for a chill late-night chat video review of Renfield.
Welcome to sub-par streaming tier cinema..er..make that dump-and-run schlock. Universal Studios reportedly spent $65MM on the comedically bankrupt, dramatically inert, and conceptually challenged Renfield. A movie that doesn’t even deserve the descriptor “multiplex fare.” It fails to meet the basic requirements for a genre-mash-up film: be entertaining. This film masquerades as comedy-horror but in fact, is fake action-trash with third-tier mob cliches attempting to pass for self-help comedy for victims of narcissism.
Remove Nic Cage from the program, all less than 20 minutes of him, and at best you have a middling streaming movie packaged with a star and a stand-up comedian who refuses to evolve as an actor (Awkwafina), delivering tired one-liners to a heartthrob Brit (Nicholas Hoult) for added rom-com swoon-value. All set ever so cutely in the world of 12-step recovery for the sake of glib humour to call out Dracula as a narcissist.
Welcome to the first four months of 2023 at the box office, where you can count the good films on one hand even if you’ve sadly lost a finger or two. Who would have thought back in February when Ant-Man 3 dropped that it would set the low bar for the rest of the year? Sub-par films—and there seems to be no shortage—may well vie for the assessment of ranking better than it for the rest of the year. For now, we have a new placeholder for “worse than” in Renfield.
Reviewing bad movies is the karmic retribution of being a reviewer. Not only have you lost the time when you could’ve watched a better movie or simply sat on a park bench watching squirrels jump across tree branches, but on top of that, you now devote further time to ponder its ills. The only revenge then is to have a little fun with it. So here goes.
Man, what a stinker. Renfield is a movie that is so mid it's worse than bad. When your end credits are more artful and captivating than your entire film, you have a serious problem on your hands. This thing isn't even worth reviewing. I captured the end credits on my phone, which I’ve included in my video review below.
A wasted Nic Cage performance in the dream casting of Dracula has just been squandered by this hackneyed story of a recovery group for co-dependency infiltrated by Dracula’s “familiar.” i.e. his servant. Remember when rehab was an edgy thing to write sardonically about? No, me neither. Netflix already did it for three seasons with Love, and that was barely watchable.
Nic Cage is the only thing worth watching here. It’s beyond me why in the hell he doesn't have or takes more control over the material at this stage in his career. Unless we are to take him at face value on the press circuit that he thought this was a great concept. The rest of the movie, i.e. the concept’s execution, is akin to something most of us would scrape off the bottom of a shoe.
The story centres around R.M. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), who decides to leave his centuries-long line of work as a henchman and familiar to Count Dracula (Nicolas Cage) and finds a new lease on life in modern-day New Orleans when he falls in love with a feisty but perennially aggressive traffic cop named Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina). But, of course, this being 2023, when Renfield’s bloodlust, sated by eating insects in Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror source novel Dracula, eats even the tiniest insect, he turns into a superhero version of himself, able to execute John Wick levels of martial arts and Crouching Tiger levels of high wire acts.
Nicolas Hoult suffers through most of his scenes acting opposite a plank of wood that shouts one-line joke tags with a smirk and a shrug every thirty seconds, otherwise known as Awkwafina. There are a thousand other actresses, even with a half credit to their name, that could better portray a human being in this role. With none of her jokes landing, her wooden delivery and vacant stare present an unwanted distraction. This is a step down from the passable annoyance she demonstrated in Shang-Chi.
Then we get to the senseless gore-fest for no reason other than blowing shit up—blood bombs explode like BBQ sauce tanks set to over-nuke every 10 minutes. The bad guys are led by mama matriarch Bellafrancesca Lobo played by the perennially gravelly-voiced Shohreh Aghdashloo from The Expanse. She does little more than pose at talking tough while mollycoddling her boob of a son Tedward Lobo, played to full Bozo levels by Ben Schwartz—whom I can only surmise must have a really good agent.
Everybody, including Renfield, Tedward, Awkwafina, and all the faceless henchmen somehow possess John Wick-level martial arts skills over goosing the action-mob clichés to the highest possible level of infantile buffoonery. The film, in its entirety, has zero stakes. Yes, it even lacks those kinds. Everyone miraculously recovers from all the mayhem. Though no tears were shed during the 12-step mayhem, none were ever required to be.
Make better movies for the love of God. This is sub-tier streaming dreck with Nic Cage shoehorned in the way Roger Corman used to get a name actor for one day's work and put them on the poster. This isn't much different. At least there you got camp. Here, you get forgettable trash.
Rating
1/5
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Was your hope set on a fun movie in Renfield? Will you still give it a watch knowing it is less than stellar? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.