Renfield (2023 | USA | 92 minutes | Chris McKay)

Shortly after declining my invite to the preview screening of the new Dracula movie Renfield, a friend forwarded me an article about Nicolas Cage having his teeth shaved to accommodate vampire dentures. Actors modifying their bodies for movie roles isn’t exactly new. Robert DeNiro reportedly put on a bunch of weight during the filming of Raging Bull and Christian Bale lost a bunch of weight for The Machinist. But what is new and unusual about this case is that Mr. Cage did this for a movie that is so embarrassingly stupid. 

The Renfield character first appeared in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel as Dracula’s loyal servant and an inmate at an insane asylum. In this new movie, he’s still Dracula’s servant but he attends support group meetings on codependency to help him gain the confidence to leave his needy boss behind. Nicholas Hoult plays Renfield and he’s fine but unremarkable.

There’s a second storyline running concurrently. It features Awkwafina as a traffic cop who is trying to take down the openly corrupt Lobo family and sees its failson Teddy (Ben Schwartz) as her nemesis. He is brash, openly confessing his numerous crimes and getting away with it again and again. He looks like Fred Savage’s character from “The Wonder Years” grown up and sporting neck tattoos. 

Nicolas Cage was likely paid handsomely for this movie and he really does appear to be having fun. He might be the only one. Awkwafina’s character is hollow and one dimensional. She’s squandered here. 

Another actor I enjoy who also feels wasted here is Brandon Scott Jones, who plays one of my favorite comedic characters on TV: Revolutionary War also-ran Isaac Higgintoot on the hilarious sitcom “Ghosts.” In Renfield, he’s Mark, the facilitator of the codependency support group and talks almost exclusively in therapy-speak. 

To its credit, Renfield doesn’t take itself seriously for even a moment. That’s usually fine but the jokes and gags here fell flat almost 100% of the time. I wish there was a sense of cleverness to the humor, but there just isn’t. The acting (save for Cage) is unconvincing and the action scenes are campy (in a bad way). I was even surprised at how little chemistry Nicholas Hoult and Awkwafina.

For all of the money and talent poured into this movie, I wish there was something, anything, I could feel optimistic about, but I keep coming up empty. I’m not sure what I was expecting Renfield to be, but it certainly wasn’t this.

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Renfield opens in theaters on Friday, April 14.