‘Renfield’ Review: Nicolas Cage and Nicholas Hoult Can’t Quite Save This Bloody Mess of a Vampire Comedy

It seemed great on paper. Nicolas Cage as Dracula? It’s a role he was born to play; it’s a wonder it hasn’t happened before now (sorry, Vampire’s Kiss doesn’t count).

Renfield, Dracula’s long-suffering servant — or in vampire parlance, “familiar” — plagued by co-dependency issues and seeking help in a support group? Sounds hilarious. An original story by Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead? I’m there.

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So why does Renfield downplay those promising aspects and turn out to be such a bloody mess?

The film, stemming from Universal’s understandable continuing attempts to capitalize on its classic monsters IP, certainly starts out promisingly. Renfield, played by Nicholas Hoult, provides background information about his relationship with the vampire in his life, illustrating his narration with nothing less than scenes from the 1931 classic Tod Browning film Dracula. Cage and Hoult are digitally inserted into the footage, replacing Bela Lugosi and the great Dwight Frye, and it’s a total kick. You find yourself waiting to see if Zelig will make an appearance.

And then Renfield shows up at the support group, headed by the friendly, welcoming Mark (Brandon Scott Jones, CBS’ Ghosts), only to find that his problems with Nosferatu aren’t exactly on the same level as the other members suffering standard toxic relationship issues. So far, so good.

And then, for some inexplicable reason, Renfield turns into, of all things, a generic crime drama. We’re introduced to Rebecca (Awkwafina), a New Orleans cop frustrated over being relegated to monitoring a drunk driver checkpoint instead of going after the Lobo crime family that was responsible for the death of her police officer father. The organization is led by the elegant Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her hotheaded son Tedward (Ben Schwartz, clearly enjoying himself), the latter of whom eventually finds himself encountering Dracula in his lair and gleefully becoming one of his undead minions.

Ryan Ridley’s convoluted screenplay proves less than engaging as Renfield and Rebecca wind up becoming unlikely partners after he saves her life when the Lobos’ heavily armed henchmen storm a bar where she’s looking for suspects. The reason Renfield is able to nearly single-handedly decimate the gang is because he gains superpowers after ingesting insects, a nod to the original character that here has been pumped up on steroids.

The result is a seemingly endless number of graphically violent encounters in which the physically unprepossessing Renfield manages to dismember his opponents at will, their various body parts, organs and limbs exploding in bloody CGI messes. Director Chris McKay (The Tomorrow War, The LEGO Batman Movie) leans into the gore with unabashed glee, but it quickly becomes a case of diminishing returns; the heavily choreographed sequences lapse into such absurd overkill that numbness sets in.

The film perks up dramatically whenever Dracula makes an appearance. Cage delivers a virtuosic turn, embellishing every facial expression and line reading with a wildly entertaining Gothic flair that is somehow simultaneously chilling and hilarious. The actor, a Dracula aficionado (he produced the terrific Shadow of the Vampire, about Max Schreck, the star of Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu), has long professed his desire to play the role, and here makes the most of it. He throws in such delicious touches as wearing a top hat in one scene, a nod to Lon Chaney’s vampire character in Browning’s lost 1927 film London After Midnight. (It hardly seems coincidental that this film is set in New Orleans, where Cage once lived in a literally haunted mansion and is destined to be buried in a custom-designed pyramid mausoleum.)

Hoult is also terrific, continuing his penchant for ignoring his ridiculous good looks — no one with cheekbones like that deserves to be funny as well — to play offbeat comic roles. And Renfield is certainly offbeat, especially when he abandons his tattered, vintage suit to don a brightly colored sweater and chinos to better blend in with the populace. You can bet that Dracula has something to say about that.

But the actors’ best efforts are thwarted by the tired plot mechanics, which minimize the most interesting element, namely the hilariously dysfunctional Dracula/Renfield relationship, and instead emphasize the sort of gangster movie plot that would have seemed stale in a 1930s Warner Brothers film. Not to mention Renfield constantly gobbling down insects to gain super-strength like some demented Marvel character. Forget the action/horror/comedy stuff. All you want to see is Dracula and Renfield sitting in a room together and talking.

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