Renfield is an absolute tonal mess. It tries to be campy, clever, and over-the-top while trying to shove a “real message” into the script. This tonal discordance continues with its excessively dramatic score and serious plot-lines, leaving you deeply confused as to what you’re supposed to be watching. They try to balance absolutely balls-to-the-wall action sequences where limbs fly across the screen and blood profusely sprays from every orifice with dramatic scenes like Awkwafina talking about struggling with her father's death and then promptly stomping away dramatically. If you weren’t convinced about how jarring this film is tonally before, the two aforementioned scenes happen right after each other. It’s as if you tried to squeeze a dumbed down The Departed-like plotline with poorly executed John Wick-esque action sequences into a campy comedy. It works out about as well as you would expect.

Lost in the shuffle of a truly mixed bag of a film, is how much Nic Cage absolutely chews this film up. He is deliciously weird and entertaining with his take on Dracula as a world-traveling vampire shacked up in an abandoned hospital in present-day New Orleans. Nicholas Hoult plays Renfield, Dracula’s straight man assistant who has grown tired of his days of immortality and longs for being a normal person again. Hoult’s amusing enough, and his take on the action sequences gives him enough to work with in terms of range in the character as he bounces back and forth from the straight man to absolute bad-ass that can rip the limbs off his victims. Awkwafina as Renfield’s love-interest Rebecca is playing the “one good cop” role as the rest of the police force is corrupted. She’s fine in the film, but her character is too lazily written for Awkwafina to make any kind of impact. For instance, we learn early on that Rebecca is desperately searching for answers to her father’s death. Sounds like a key character detail, right? The movie would disagree, as this plot point is brought up once and promptly forgotten about midway through the film.

No matter how engaging the fight sequences and clever the comedy could try to be, nothing could save this movie from the absolutely dreadfully boring and bland script. The idea that of flipping the story of Dracula on its head with a focus on Renfield and Dracula’s codependent relationship is funny in theory, and the idea that they get sucked into the middle of a mob thriller is a concept that could work. However, the script is so under-developed, glacially paced, and bogged down by random dramatic moments completely irrelevant to the plot. 

To top all this off, the crafts are honestly some of the worst I’ve seen in years. The makeup here had the potential to be remotely interesting, but instead they decided to cake Nic Cage with a mountain of foundation and call it a day. Any type of dismemberment makeup could have been interesting if they didn’t cut around the fight sequences like we were stuck on a drunk drone speeding and bouncing off walls. It is next to impossible to see anything outside of streams of blood gushing out of every part of a body imaginable.

Renfield was just a massive disappointment. I went in just simply hoping to be entertained, but this film couldn’t even do that. The only real accomplishment it has is having a runtime of 93 minutes and somehow feeling twice as long. This movie refuses to commit to anything for more than 5 minutes, and the script just sucked out any fun from the intriguing concept. While Renfield works on occasion, its fatal flaw is trying to be so many different things that it winds up feeling like nothing by the end.

4/10