Renfield

Nicolas Cage and vampirism go way back.

In the late 1980s, he starred as a New York literary agent who feared he was turning into a vampire in Vampire’s Kiss. Many of Cage’s most iconic memes and outbursts come from this bizarre horror comedy for which he ate a live cockroach and demanded hot yogurt be poured on his feet during a love scene.

Then in the fall of 2011, an antiques dealer unearthed — and tried selling for one million dollars — an 1870 photograph of a man bearing more than a little resemblance to Cage. The Civil War era photo set the Internet ablaze enough to the point where Cage had to deny it was him a few months later on David Letterman’s late night show.

And now, Cage can be seen playing the most famous vampire of all, Count Dracula, although sadly it is merely a supporting role in Renfield, an action comedy focused on Dracula’s servant.

In present-day New Orleans, Robert Montagu Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) joins a support group for people in toxic relationships. While most of the attendees discuss the abuse doled out by romantic partners, Renfield remains tight-lipped about his unhealthy relationship with his deadly, narcissistic longtime boss. Dracula requires regular feasting on human blood and this is but one of many responsibilities that fall on Renfield, the “familiar” who gets his own power from eating bugs and has his wounds healed by Dracula’s blood.

There are interesting ideas in this premise adapted straight from Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel. And one could not conceive better casting than Cage as Dracula, throwing himself at the part with the same classic film nerd passion he displayed raving about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as a version of himself in last year’s very fun comedy The Extraordinary Weight of Massive Talent.

Alas, Renfield fails to realize all the potential it has in its foundation. It misplaces the goodwill it has coming in with a routine and absurdly violent contemporary crime tale. The narrative places the conflicted undead eponymous lackey in between feared organized crime figure Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz, scoring a few of the movie’s bigger laughs) and Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), an honest cop looking to avenge her policeman father’s death on the job but having to settle for handling DUI checkpoints for the time being.

It feels like the storyline of a sequel to a movie that has already explored the complicated history of Dracula and Renfield, but Renfield has not earned that and it never will with this underwhelming approach. The lion’s share of the blame falls on Ryan Ridley, the TV-seasoned, Emmy-winning scribe of such beloved shows as “Community” and “Rick and Morty” who is very clearly making his feature screenwriting debut here. None of the ideas add up satisfactorily and for that maybe we must also fault Robert Kirkman, the co-creator of “The Walking Dead” comic books, who alone takes story credit.

Director Chris McKay, whose background lies in animation and whose debut at the helm was 2017’s formidable The Lego Batman Movie, repeatedly resorts to graphic limb-ripping, blood-splattering carnage, seemingly to distract from the writing’s glaring deficiencies and the general lack of wit. The film has its share of amusing moments, but most of them come early and from Cage commanding the screen with his expectedly weird ways. The movie does not even know how to utilize its biggest star, tossing him to the sidelines for most of the runtime and failing to explore his point-of-view, unimaginatively just letting him be the villain of the piece.

For that matter, no other actor is particularly well-utilized. Awkwafina is a reliably funny presence whose perpetually flummoxed state grows tiresome in the uninspired crime plot that even a buddy cop comedy would more fully commit to. Schwartz does what he can with an on-brand role, but cannot sustain the humor of the early moments in which he hurls bags of cocaine at traffic cops. The veteran Hoult will never be unlikable, but neither he nor the movie fully figures out his titular character. Most of the time, he’s channeling his About a Boy co-star Hugh Grant as a polite, stammering anachronism, but then we’re supposed to take him seriously when he’s literally disarming and destroying dirty cops and SWAT teams because he just downed an ant farm. One last talent let down by the material is Shohreh Aghdashloo, who is given a grand intro and what should be a juicy role as a crime family matriarch but just becomes another mildly compelling piece that fails to fit into this mess of a puzzle.

While there will no doubt be far worse mainstream studio movies put out this year, Renfield disappoints more than most because of the promise it held. This was a project that sounded like a dream on paper and, with a new take on a 125-year-old novel, it almost constitutes original storytelling, that far too rare concept in today’s marketplace. If you’re just looking for some really bloody combat and a few laughs, then this fits the bill as mindless off-season multiplex fare. Personally, I found so much more to enjoy in the two Nics’ prior collaboration, playing father and son in Gore Verbinski’s supremely underrated dark dramedy The Weather Man (2005), and would be remiss if I didn’t take an opportunity to recommend that little treasure instead.