Rating: 2/5
Renfield is in a toxic, codependent relationship with his boss, Dracula. He’s trapped, seeing to Dracula’s needs while neglecting his own. When he meets Rebecca, he learns he has to stand up for himself, or he might as well give up.
The structure and plot of the movie are paint-by-number but from multiple paintings.
The narration and freeze frames are Scorsese-core without understanding their motivation.
The gore is over-the-top, reminiscent of McKay’s work on Robot Chicken. It doesn’t work for me.
Nicholas Hoult looks like a haunted Victorian child, so Renfield is an appropriate role for him.
Turning Renfield into a bug-powered superhero is so uninteresting. The lack of consistency in Renfield’s power is annoying.
The film relegates Awkwafina to the “Ice Cube in SVU” role — “You’re telling me you work for Dracula?” Thankfully, some of her awful jokes from the trailer are absent in the movie.
She’s the funniest part of this movie. She knows what movie she is in and how to deliver the jokes. They don’t all work, but she hits more often than anyone else.
She never gets injured once in fighting alongside Renfield, making her theoretically more powerful than him.
Nicholas Cage as Dracula is amusing, but this was the wrong vehicle for him to play Dracula. He never goes full Cage, but he gets some Cage-isms in.
The best part of the movie is when they inserted Cage’s Dracula and Hoult’s Renfield in the Bela Lugosi Dracula. It looked great! I felt bummed when that part ended.
Dad laughed at people getting hit in the head. He said, “Oh god,” whenever Renfield ripped off people’s limbs and faces.