Renfield

There have been two movies in these opening months of the year that really had me hyped. Not MCU movies, not big blockbusters, not slashers … Cocaine Bear and Renfield. The trailers for both gave the impression that both movies knew they were silly and were prepared to embrace it and have some carnage-fueled fun. Cocaine Bear ended up being a barely acceptable disappointment, as the trailers promised maulings galore and a crazy, coked-up bear, and instead we got a bunch of human drama with an occasional moment of a bear in it. I was hopeful Renfield would right the wrong, that the movie the trailer promised would be the movie I got: a funny, silly horror comedy about the beleaguered familiar of Dracula. Nope. I got Cocaine Bear’ed. Again. Lemme say up front that Nicolases Cage and Hoult are great in this. Hoult’s Renfield is a fragile, shaken, desperate man who has lost his soul and his self-worth, and what he’s gotten in return is nowhere near what he gave up. Hoult nails it, all the while being funny when the moment calls for it. Cage is an amazing Dracula; all his weird mannerisms and deliveries and facial expressions are perfect here. There’s touched of more classical Dracula portrayals, especially Lugosi, but Cage’s is his own and it is grand. The humor in this is fun, and the carnage is off the charts (even if it is CGI). But two things really hurt this movie. The first is that this isn’t really Renfield’s movie. He shares it — and in some cases, is pushed out of the limelight — in favor of a long, uninteresting, tedious, and wholly unnecessary story about a cop whose cop dad was killed by a local cartel, and the ENTIRE rest of the police force is on the take, so she can’t get justice, and the only person she can trust is her sister, who is an FBI agent. This battle between the mob and this cop isn’t a side story — it is THE story. Renfield and Dracula orbit around it, not the other way around, and it is infuriating. I didn’t come to this movie to watch a cop-out-for-payback story. I came for a horror comedy from Renfield’s point of view, and his story is only the second most important in the movie (and by the end, maybe the third). Every moment of this cop story just drags the movie down. And that is because of problem #2: the cop is Awkwafina. I have now seen her in at least three movies, and I can safely say she SUUUUUUUUUUCKS as an actress. She plays one character in every movie, and it is terrible. She isn’t believable as a cop, she isn’t believable as a sister, she isn’t believable as ANYTHING. She is terrible. Every moment she is on screen is like a tornado alarm screeching in my ear, and I hate it, and that she is as important to the movie as Renfield — maybe more — is disheartening to no end. I wish I could say more good things about this movie. There’s enough to say it’s worth a watch I guess, but nothing to rush out to see, because the trailer is a flat out lie. What you think you’re gonna get and what you do get aren’t in the same book, or even the same library. Change the cops to vampire hunters and this movie would cook. But nobody asked for vampire Tango & Cash, which is what this is, which makes it exactly what Cocaine Bear was: barely acceptable.