'Renfield' Tries to Put the Bite on 'Super Mario' This Weekend

It doesn't get much more wacky than a story about the legendary Count Dracula in which the vampire is played by legendary scenery chewer Nicolas Cage. When you throw in the fact that the movie is based on a story by The Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman, you might have the recipe for a hit. But to be a hit, the movie will have to fight off a juggernaut--The Super Mario Bros. Movie--when it opens this weekend. Read on for details.

Via The New Yorker.

It’s a strange feeling to watch a movie made by manifestly talented people on both sides of the camera--people who have done their work thoughtfully, and have even flung themselves into it vigorously--but realize that the film doesn’t catch the spark of life. That’s what happens with “Renfield,” the new vampire comedy directed by Chris McKay, and it’s all the more disheartening because the movie is not an unpleasant one to watch. It’s bouncy, clever, amiable, and idiosyncratic, but its virtues seem inseparable from its over-all inertness and triviality. The irresistible elevator-pitch version of the movie--Count Dracula’s assistant tries to free himself from his diabolical master’s yoke--is the best thing that it has to offer; the filmmakers struggle to capture and channel the energy of this conceptual lightning bolt.

“Renfield” is the playful, torrentially gory story of Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), Count Dracula’s so-called familiar, a servant and handler who’s endowed with a modicum of his bloodthirsty boss’s supernatural powers. Renfield needs to find a new hideout so that they can keep a step ahead of the authorities. Young of appearance and quaint in his manners--he is, of course, more than a century old but unnaturally preserved in eternal youth—Renfield installs himself in an apartment in New Orleans and finds a basement in an abandoned hospital where Dracula (Nicolas Cage) can hole up. The prince of darkness has been horribly burned in a mystical accident, but it’s nothing that some human blood can’t fix, and procuring the living elixir is Renfield’s problem. That’s why the faithful servant attends meetings of a codependency support group--to identify its members’ unwanted partners and capture them for Dracula’s uses. In the course of those meetings, however, Renfield himself realizes that he’s in a codependent relationship with Dracula, and, equipped with new ideas, schemes to end it.

Until he dares to do so, he’s stuck in the body-trafficking business, and he gets caught up in a battle between drug dealers--which he ends with a literally decapitating punch. As a result, Renfield soon finds himself facing off against a young gangster named Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz), the ne’er-do-well scion of the city’s main crime family, which has a tentacular grip on the police department. Teddy doesn’t hesitate to lead an ambush against a young officer, Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), who tries to arrest him, and Renfield is quickly both allied and smitten with her, while making enemies of the Lobos. When Renfield finally offers his declaration of independence from Dracula, the vampire joins forces with the crooks and their leader: Teddy’s mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo), the Mob queenpin whose lair is equipped with instruments of torture. It all leads to a mighty showdown.

As logically as “Renfield” is assembled, it also feels backfilled, built not as a story that contains its own mainspring of dramatic necessity but in the conditional tense, suggesting what kind of movie based on its one-line premise might be or could be made.

Get the rest of the story at The New Yorker.