2023 comedy-horror, dir. Chris McKay, Nicholas Hoult, Awkwafina:
IMDb /
allmovie. What if
Dracula's servitor tried to get out from under his thumb?
It's a great idea. Renfield has been dominated by Dracula's
charisma, but finally wakes up to the fact that he's being a horrible
person serving a worse person, and tries to do something good instead.
And Hoult impressed me in Mad Max: Fury Road and the very early
Warm Bodies, in both of which he's also a put-upon guy who comes to
believe in his own value as a person. Awkwafina plays a cop obsessed
with taking down the crime family that killed her father; she was
decent in a small part in Ocean's 8. And in more minor roles, we
have Nicolas Cage as Dracula (he was the original choice to play him
in Shadow of the Vampire until Malkovich turned up), and Shohreh
Aghdashloo as the crime boss.
But while there's a very solid cast, we have an original pitch by the
guy who co-created The Walking Dead, turned into a script by one of
the writers on Rick and Morty, and directed by the guy who directed
Robot Chicken. Nothing is ever any more complex than it appears on
the surface. There are some potentially interesting concepts but none
of them is ever developed.
Also, we get Ben Schwarz as the crime boss's failson; he usually works
as a comedian and that's basically what he does here too. Someone as
ruthless as his mother is meant to be would have thrown him to the
sharks years ago.
Parts of it work even so. Renfield has been going to group therapy
sessions on toxic relationships, to locate people's toxic partners and
murder them to feed Dracula; but he gradually realises that this
applies to him too, that Dracula is using him not only as a servant
but to feed his own narcissism. If this film has a message at all,
it's "talking out your problems is good".
But there's also a surprising amount of gore, shot in a comedy excess
mode, and that didn't work as well for me.
Whenever Cage and Aghdashloo are on screen together, there's a strong
sense of "quiet down children, the grown-ups are acting now". Frankly
I'd have liked to see more of them and less of the young pretty
people. This could have been a great film, but it uses easy action
cliché to paper over the lack of thought.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.
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