In one of the many jacked-up, bodies-leaping-and-flying, vampire-meets-action-film sequences that punctuate “Renfield,” Dracula (Nicolas Cage), jutting into the movie well before we expect him to, does all the throat-ripping damage he can in a montage that culminates in drapes being thrown open, the sunlight flooding in, and the vampire, in his red bathrobe, bursting into flame. It looks like the climax of many a vampire film, and it leaves Dracula a charred husk. But has he been killed? No way! As Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), Dracula’s servant and disciple, explains to us in voice-over, when something like this happens it takes a lot of work to return Dracula to his previous state. Renfield must gather up many new victims for his master to feed upon. But with enough blood and enough time, Dracula can claw his way back to his old robust undead form.
A little later, Renfield, who feeds off Dracula’s powers, faces off against some criminals in a sleazy New Orleans bar, and a hulking hitman in an executioner’s mask uses a knife to slash Renfield’s guts right open. We think that might be the end of him, but no: Renfield eats a bug, which fortifies his strength, and he pops back into action like a superhero who got momentarily knocked for a loop.
One of the many lures of the vampire genre is that it operates in close spiritual proximity to death. But in “Renfield,” with its leaping, limb-tearing, slo-mo-and-back fight scenes that are like something out of a more splatterific “Kick-Ass,” nothing about death is particularly permanent. The blood spurts and flows — it’s a very fluid movie. And the rules turn out to be fluid too. The grip of a Dracula film was once linked to the prospect of a stake being plunged through Dracula’s heart (the finality of it), but in “Renfield” there is no stake. And there’s nothing much at stake.
Is it fun to see Nicolas Cage go full vampire for the first time since “Vampire’s Kiss,” the low-budget 1988 indie in which he essentially launched himself as the Method maniac of operatic kitsch kabuki overacting? Yes, it is. In “Vampire’s Kiss,” Cage played a fusty New York literary agent who thought he was a vampire (the movie, in its maladroit shoestring way, anticipated the premise of “American Psycho”), but in “Renfield” he’s the full grand article: Dracula himself, with pasty mottled skin and hair slicked back and a scary row of teeth, every one of them a gleaming pointed fang. The makeup and costumes, like Dracula’s black velvet smoking jacket with the dark glitter lapels, liberate Cage to give an outlandish but layered performance, one that draws on the entire hallowed history of big-screen Draculas.
There’s a base layer of Bela Lugosi (early on we see Cage and Hoult digitized into black-and-white images of Tod Browning’s timeless 1931 version), and there’s a nod, in Cage’s rictus grin, to the Lon Chaney of “London After Midnight,” as well as an overtone of Christopher Lee’s imperiously gnashing, leering Dracula of the late ’50s and ’60s. On top of it all is the Cage mystique. His faux-aristocratic performance is no mere camp freakout; he sinks his acting teeth into the power of Dracula — the vampire’s addiction not only to blood but to his own megalomania, to the idea that it’s his unholy right to live this way. But, of course, there’s a comic side to the seething dynamics; Cage’s Dracula is so quick, so in thrall to his legend, that he’ll slice you with sarcasm. It’s a witty and luscious performance, unhinged but never out of control, and it deserved a movie that could serve as a pedestal for the actor’s seasoned flamboyance.
“Renfield,” though, has no mystery, no poetry, no grandeur. It’s a scattershot lark jam-packed with “ideas,” none of which really take hold. Renfield, embodied by Nicholas Hoult as if he were the Hugh Grant of the ’90s playing a neurasthenic British pop star of the ’80s (think Robert Smith or the members of Spandau Ballet), is introduced at a 12-step meeting for people in codependent relationships, and the film’s overarching joke is that Dracula is an abusive narcissist whose power over Renfield is a form of gaslighting. The 12-step scenes generate a few chuckles, but for the joke to have taken hold the partnership between Dracula and Renfield needed to be drawn with more depth. Renfield’s complicity in the relationship is alluded to, but it’s not really part of the texture. He’s just a victim trying to wriggle out of an arrangement he’s tired of.
After helping set up Dracula’s lair (candles, pea-green fluourescent light, hanging pints of blood) in the bowels of the Old Charity Hospital, Renfield moves into his own place and gives himself a makeover — a more conservative haircut and a sweater out of an old Benetton commercial. He steps away from Dracula and becomes a little more boring.
I haven’t mentioned the underworld crime-family plot, which feels like something grafted on from another movie. That’s because the director, Chris McKay, working from a script by Ryan Ridley, italicizes everything in a nuance-free way, never creating the organic genre mash-up he’s going for. The Lobos family, led by Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo), with her tattooed hooligan son Ted (Ben Schwartz) as the lead henchman, are drug dealers being protected by the cops. The family forms an alliance with Dracula, but Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), a noble renegade officer, want to avenge her policeman father’s death by going after them. Awkwafina gives a blunt and overstated performance, and the connection that develops between Rebecca and Renfield falls into some vague zone between romance and logistical necessity.
Hoult’s Renfield is this shrinking violet, armed with his self-help book about toxic narcissism, but in the fight scenes he’s a kamikaze, using dripping limbs as spears, punching out heads or tearing off faces, the blood gushing in Hawaiian Punch geysers. He’s whatever the movie needs him to be. The calculation at the core of “Renfield” is a cynical one: The filmmakers know that an action film will be bigger at the box office than something that’s just an oddball Nick Cage vampire film. But the hypomanic violence of “Renfield,” even as it will help sell the movie, detracts from what the movie is. How can you tell the story of someone who eases himself out of a codependent relationship with Dracula but does it by being every bit as nonchalantly homicidal as Dracula? “Renfield” is such a flip grab-bag of a movie that it makes Dracula’s thirsty power-tripping look humane.
