Renfield (2023)

[Eric the Fall Guy]

Discuss! Bleh bleh bleh

[filmlover]

Gory and goofy but low on actual laughs and nowhere nearly as much fun as a "Nicolas Cage as Dracula" horror/comedy should be. To the surprise of no one, Cage arguably turns out to be the best part about the movie: his penchant for going over the top makes him the ideal actor to play Dracula. Unfortunately, he's actually not in it nearly as much as one would expect, and his performance is surrounded by an underwhelming mix of cardboard-flat characters (not at all the fault of the actors - Nicholas Hoult is fine while Awkwafina makes the most of a generic "love interest" role beneath her talents) and scattershot storytelling interrupted every now and then by cartoonishly bloody action scenes. There's some enjoyable parts (especially the beginning) and it's not the worst attempt by Universal at modernizing their classic monsters (hello and goodbye, The Mummy '17), but this ends up a forgettable 93 minutes that can wait until it arrives streaming to watch as background noise. C

[MOVIEGUY]

I would've turned this off if it wasn't for Nicolas Cage. He was a great Dracula and deserved a much better movie. There were a couple funny gags and a few fun moments during the fight scenes, but for the most part the comedy felt forced and unfunny and the fight scenes felt overdone and John Wick-lite which seems to be the norm now. 

 

The police and gang subplots felt like completely boilerplate action-comedy story elements that weren't interesting at all and made the movie even more frustrating because YOU'VE GOT NICOLAS CAGE AS DRACULA. Just give us more of that. He's fucking great here and gets sidelined by all these underwritten subplots that no one cares about. I was looking forward to this but ended up pretty disappointed.