‘Renfield’ overview: Nicolas Cage’s vampire film belongs in a coffin

Query: Is Nicolas Cage enjoying Rely Dracula a robust sufficient concept to hold a 90-minute movie?

In a buzzy studio pitch assembly, I’d in all probability shout “sure!”

Caught in a movie show seat watching “Renfield” plod alongside, the reply is a convincing meh.

Because the Rely from “Sesame Avenue” would say, “‘Renfield’ will get TWO stars! Ah, ah, ah.”

Cage — whose profession has grow to be so goofy he just lately performed a parody model of himself who will get kidnapped by a Spanish drug lord — is as humorous and self-aware because the evil outdated vampire.

Loopy, it could appear, has grow to be Cage’s new regular. 

However don’t come in search of a wacky sendup of the story within the vein of Mel Brooks’ “Younger Frankenstein.”

It’s truly not whilst hilarious as that director’s much-worse 1995 film “Dracula: Lifeless and Loving It,” and out of doors of some fundamental particulars the movie has little to do with Bram Stoker’s ebook.

“Renfield,” directed by Chris McKay, has extra in widespread with the (much better) “Zombieland” sequence, with high-body-count motion sequences, quick-cut comedy and an unlikely, socially awkward hero. 

That might be Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), Rely Dracula’s beleaguered “acquainted,” who has been gifted an unnaturally lengthy life in change for bringing the vamp contemporary victims. His different quirk is that he will get superpowers by consuming bugs.

At the start of the film, at a church group remedy assembly in current day New Orleans, Renfield pronounces, “I’m in a damaging relationship.” (Need leaden jokes about poisonous companions and managers? “Renfield” has them.)

It’s an exhausting gig. Just about each time Dracula seems vanquished over the many years, Renfield brings him to a brand new metropolis and nurses him again to well being. At first, Cage’s Rely has vine-y, sagging pores and skin, just like the Grand Excessive Witch from “The Witches” — however cheaper. Assume Outdated Gregg.

After some blood-sucking, he’s again to being that recognizable nationwide treasure.

However Renfield needs to flee from beneath his merciless boss’ centuries-old thumb, and he begins to construct the braveness to just do that after he meets and falls in love with Officer Rebecca Quincy (Awkwafina), a critical cop hell-bent on bringing down the Lobo crime household (Shohreh Aghdashloo, along with her smokey and threatening voice because the boss, is terrific casting). 

Woe to Awkwafina. So hilarious in “Loopy Wealthy Asians” and on “Nora From Queens,” right here she has a cardboard, bookish, humorless function. The identical is generally true for the enormously proficient Hoult, whose display screen time is wasted on nervous mumbling and intensely gory struggle scenes. For all of the gallons of blood which might be spilled, Renfield is a cold half.

The final third of the film, through which Renfield and Rebecca are on the run — kind of from Dracula, kind of from the cops and kind of from the Mafia — is a wash.

After all, most individuals don’t know each minute element of Stoker’s novel and so they probably haven’t seen the 1931 Tod Browning film. (The most effective a part of “Renfield” is a brief prologue that cleverly re-creates a few of that.) 

Nonetheless, we’re left wanting higher, smarter, “Dracula”-specific jokes. As an alternative we get witless, back-of-the-drawer exchanges like this one:

Quincy: “Do you wash his cape?”

Renfield: “No. It’s dry-clean solely.”

Is that this a movie script — or my uncle on Thanksgiving?

The bit — the one bit, actually— is that Renfield is Dracula’s mistreated assistant. The Transylvanian terror is a complete Miranda Priestly, solely undead and performed by a slapstick Cage. That shtick, and Renfield moping across the French Quarter like Charlie Brown, is worn-out after 20 minutes.

Cage is amusing although, and exemplifies the outdated stage knowledge “should you’re having enjoyable, they’re having enjoyable.” 

Nevertheless, that’s the most important downside for “Renfield”: At any time when Cage leaves the body, which is usually, we instantly cease having enjoyable — as if Dracula commanded us to.