Ideas are easy. It’s what you do with them — or don’t — that counts.
So: What if we removed a couple of characters from Victorian Freudian gothic horror and plopped them down into today’s touchy-feely pop-psychology framework and see how they performed self-care? Not the worst idea ever! Oh, is cursed immortal Count Dracula a narcissist? Is his half-cursed, also immortal toady familiar Renfield codependent? LOL. It definitely has comedic possibilities.
And maybe if Renfield had stuck with that one idea and really run with it, actually went to fucking town with extrapolating the ramifications of this, it might have had something interesting or at least diverting to say. But it also wants to plop these characters down into the middle of an unironic urban dramatic crime thriller, the kind with the grim thin line between cops and criminals. It also wants to be a little bit fish-out-of-water, odd-couple buddy rom-com and straight-up action punch-fest.
Probably even all that coulda worked, too… if the very-nice-I’m-sure-but-kinda-lazy folks behind Renfield hadn’t seemingly agreed that the first draft of this everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink script was good enough to go with, sure, why not? It ends up giving you whiplash, how it knocks you around. It really feels like writer Ryan Ridley — a veteran of Rick & Morty and Community, and boy, does this feel sitcom-y — just threw a lot of stuff against the wall hoping that some of it would stick, and was probably even horrified when everyone else was all, “Yeah, this is great. No notes. Greenlit!” (There are WGA rules about writers being paid for rewrites, is part of what I’m saying.)
Everyone in this movie is in a different movie, which is generally considered a thing to be avoided, creatively speaking. Nicholas Hoult’s (True History of the Kelly Gang, Tolkien) Renfield is the sweet center, mostly inhabiting the self-care and rom-com realms, and he’s genuinely lovely. But then he has to interact with Nicolas Cage’s (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Pig) Dracula, channeling Bela Legosi and hamming it up as a full-on velvet-clad monster of grotesquerie. Which is amusing enough but has been imported at great expense from a profoundly unrelated cinematic experience. Awkwafina’s (The Bad Guys, Raya and the Last Dragon) New Orleans cop is centered in the municipal-corruption plot — she wants to avenge her cop-father who was killed by local crime lords, etc — with some small intersection with the rom-com aspect as she teams up with Hoult’s Renfield, but, wow, it’s forced. The goddess Shohreh Aghdashloo (A Simple Wedding, Star Trek Beyond) as the local crime lord deserves her own movie, but it is nowhere near this one. Then there’s the gory-funny fast-paced dismemberments of bad-guy minions, vaguely Tarantino-esque but not enough to really register as its own thing.
All the tonal mismatches here are baffling. We might almost consider it a plot by evil-minded undead aristocrats to discombobulate us mere mortals. Or something. There’s probably a decent movie in that idea, too.
more films like this:
• Shaun of the Dead [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• What We Do in the Shadows [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | BBC iPlayer UK]
A shame; as you say, it’s a great trio in the lead roles. I wonder whether some of this is tending in the direction of Hong Kong films of the 1980s-1990s; the ones I’ve seen go all over the place between serious drama, romantic comedy, big action scene, two guys doing pratfalls, and so on, and I think that sort of thing is more usual in Chinese film too.
Having now seen this: there are bits that are great, and every time Cage and Aghdashloo are on screen together there’s a strong “shut up children, the grown-ups are acting” vibe, but the actual script seems to think it’s enough to throw stuff at the screen and hope the audience will enjoy it.
Kirkman is apparently a comics writer first, and he seems to be playing to the stereotyped comics reader audience. “And then he pulls the bad guy’s arms off! And then he throws them at two other bad guys! And the blood goes pssssh!” Meanwhile the romance is so underwritten it’s barely there.
Meanwhile Ben Schwarz is so obviously a comedian that he doesn’t seem to fit here at all.
bummed to hear this, as this is the only thing that even looked worth a damn playing at the theater where I’ll be this coming week. . . I might still check it out, rather than see nothing at all, or, worse, the mario movie