Count Dracula has been dead for so long and gone through so many iterations — exotic, satanic, romantic — that it’s almost surprising there’s any juice left in the thirsty old boy. Yet here he is again, resurrected by a glorious, vamping Nicolas Cage, swinging a cape, baring his fangs and stealing his every scene. The Count is playing second banana in “Renfield,” but he’s nevertheless a main attraction in this cheerfully disposable entertainment, which perfectly understands that sometimes all you want from a movie is 93 minutes of well-wrought absurdity.
I imagine that the pitch to the studio went something like this: “It’s today, and Dracula (we’d love to get Cage) is in New Orleans for the tax breaks, out of money and, long story short, almost drained of his powers. He’s basically toast, and our guy, the Count’s unhappy servant, Renfield (a Nicholas Hoult type, relatable, smooth, good-looking) — after years of groveling and scarfing bugs — has had it. We want to make this a rocking action movie, with lots of blood and kick-ass fights, but also funny, so Renfield enters a codependency group to purge his personal demon. Has anyone heard of Stuart Smalley?”
That’s more or less how “Renfield” plays, and while it’s wittier and slicker than my spurious studio-speak, it is about as condensed. Fast, tight and blunt, the movie gets right to the point with a characteristically American mix of therapy-speak and jokey violence, and it largely stays on point. The filmmakers — Robert Kirkman cooked up the story, Ryan Ridley wrote the script and Chris McKay directed — don’t laboriously reintroduce Dracula, exhume his origin story or invent a childhood trauma to somehow explain him. After a century of pop-culture celebrity and box-office success there’s no need: He is what he is, a vampire.
He’s also, unsurprisingly given the job’s grisly requirements, a terrible boss, which the movie uses to economically establish how the long-suffering Renfield joins the support group. There, coaxed by the group’s leader (Brandon Scott Jones) and surrounded by glum faces and chirpy affirmations, Renfield confronts his low self-esteem and reliance on his toxic benefactor. He listens and he shares, and while the other members are puzzled by the odder details of his relationship, the group boosts his confidence enough that he embarks on a lifestyle makeover. He combs his hair, brightens his color palette, finds his smile.
