Question: Is Nicolas Cage playing Count Dracula a strong enough idea to carry a 90-minute film?
In a buzzy studio pitch meeting, I’d probably shout “yes!”
Running time: 93 minutes. Rated R (bloody violence, some gore, language throughout and some drug use.) In theaters April 14.
Stuck in a movie theater seat watching “Renfield” plod along, the answer is a resounding meh.
As the Count from “Sesame Street” would say, “‘Renfield’ gets TWO stars! Ah, ah, ah.”
Cage — whose career has become so goofy he recently played a parody version of himself who gets kidnapped by a Spanish drug lord — is as funny and self-aware as the evil old vampire.
Crazy, it would seem, has become Cage’s new normal.
But don’t come looking for a wacky sendup of the story in the vein of Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein.”
It’s actually not even as hilarious as that director’s much-worse 1995 movie “Dracula: Dead and Loving It,” and outside of a few basic details the film has little to do with Bram Stoker’s book.
“Renfield,” directed by Chris McKay, has more in common with the (far better) “Zombieland” series, with high-body-count action sequences, quick-cut comedy and an unlikely, socially awkward hero.
That would be Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), Count Dracula’s beleaguered “familiar,” who has been gifted an unnaturally long life in exchange for bringing the vamp fresh victims. His other quirk is that he gets superpowers by eating bugs.
At the beginning of the movie, at a church group therapy meeting in present day New Orleans, Renfield announces, “I am in a destructive relationship.” (Want leaden jokes about toxic partners and bosses? “Renfield” has them.)
It’s an exhausting gig. Pretty much every time Dracula appears vanquished over the decades, Renfield brings him to a new city and nurses him back to health. At first, Cage’s Count has vine-y, sagging skin, like the Grand High Witch from “The Witches” — but cheaper. Think Old Gregg.
After some blood-sucking, he’s back to being that recognizable national treasure.
But Renfield wants to escape from under his cruel boss’ centuries-old thumb, and he starts to build the courage to do just that after he meets and falls in love with Officer Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), a serious cop hell-bent on bringing down the Lobo crime family (Shohreh Aghdashloo, with her smokey and threatening voice as the boss, is terrific casting).
Woe to Awkwafina. So hilarious in “Crazy Rich Asians” and on “Nora From Queens,” here she has a cardboard, bookish, humorless role. The same is mostly true for the enormously talented Hoult, whose screen time is wasted on nervous mumbling and extremely gory fight scenes. For all the gallons of blood that are spilled, Renfield is a bloodless part.
The last third of the movie, in which Renfield and Rebecca are on the run — sort of from Dracula, sort of from the cops and sort of from the Mafia — is a wash.
Of course, most people don’t know every minute detail of Stoker’s novel and they likely haven’t seen the 1931 Tod Browning movie. (The best part of “Renfield” is a short prologue that cleverly re-creates some of that.)
Still, we’re left wanting better, smarter, “Dracula”-specific jokes. Instead we get witless, back-of-the-drawer exchanges like this one:
Quincy: “Do you wash his cape?”
Renfield: “No. It’s dry-clean only.”
Is this a film script — or my uncle on Thanksgiving?
The bit — the only bit, really— is that Renfield is Dracula’s mistreated assistant. The Transylvanian terror is a total Miranda Priestly, only undead and played by a slapstick Cage. That shtick, and Renfield moping around the French Quarter like Charlie Brown, is worn-out after 20 minutes.
Cage is amusing though, and exemplifies the old stage wisdom “if you’re having fun, they’re having fun.”
However, that’s the biggest problem for “Renfield”: Whenever Cage leaves the frame, which is often, we immediately stop having fun — as if Dracula commanded us to.