Renfield (2023)

I was eager to see Renfield as soon as the trailer for it dropped. Well, to be more accurate, I was eager to see Renfield as soon as I heard of Nicolas Cage being cast as Dracula. Seeing the on-set photographs, and THEN finally seeing the trailer, made this a film that I knew I couldn’t miss. I knew a lot of people who felt the same way, which then made me sad to see the reaction to it eventually start to cool. Perhaps it just hadn’t managed to fulfill the promise of that glorious potential.

Ah well, everyone disappointed by this is wrong (please note sarcasm, everyone is entitled to their own informed opinion). Renfield is as fantastic as you want it to be.

It’s the story of Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), as the title suggests. Tired of working tirelessly to protect and feed his vampiric master (Cage), Renfield starts to make plans to live a more free, and healthier, life. Dracula doesn’t want that, of course, and there’s an inevitable confrontation looming. There’s also a confrontation looming between a major crime family (headed up by Shohreh Aghdashloo, trying to keep her cocky son, played by Ben Schwartz, in check) and a police officer (Awkwafina) who ends up being helped massively by Renfield and his super-powers. Oh yeah, this Renfield can gain super-powers whenever he eats a bug or two.

The main draw here, for most people anyway, is Cage playing Dracula, and his performance is absolutely superb. Although this is a horror comedy, with a lot of the humour coming from wildly over the top gore, the leads generally play things straight, which is a winning approach. Cage is brilliantly riffing on classic portrayals of Dracula, adding some extra tetchiness as he maintains an increasingly-strained relationship with his young servant, and he always feels as dangerous as he should. Hoult is a standard lovable loser, he just happens to be burdened with a boss even worse than anyone that most of us have had to work for, and he acquits himself equally well in the action moments that allow him to tear people apart with his bare hands. Awkwafina also plays her part pretty straight, although she has a natural dry wit that works well as part of her character, and Aghdashaloo is a straightforward criminal matriarch. Schwartz is the main person allowed to play his part in line with most of his other comedic roles, but that feels fine for Schwartz, someone I like who maybe isn’t quite ready yet to stretch himself as much as some other actors. I also need to mention Brandon Scott Jones, a comedic highlight as the leader of a support group visited by Renfield, and special mention to the cast members playing the members of that group, every one of them doing their bit to add great comedy to their scenes.

Ryan Ridley gets the main script credit, helped by both Robert Kirkman and Ava Tramer, and the main thing he gets right is simply not fumbling the brilliant idea at the heart of the film - Renfield and Dracula viewed as two people caught in a very toxic relationship. There are amusing lines here and there, and the bloody set-pieces to enjoy, but most of the fun comes from dialogue for Renfield that has more literal meaning than anyone else suspects. Well, admittedly, the MOST fun is watching someone use a couple of severed limbs as a makeshift set of nunchucks, but the dialogue throughout is pretty great, full of smart and sly subversions of phrases we have heard used many times from people offering advice on different types of relationships.

Director Chris McKay continues his successful movie streak, and shows his skill for playing around with iconic figures (as he also did so brilliantly with The LEGO Batman Movie), and there’s some ideal universe where this film made a shedload of cash and already had a sequel greenlit. Every character gets a moment to shine, and that includes very minor characters, the perfect runtime helps the pacing, and everything makes sense in the context of the relative silliness of it all. 

While I can understand some people not enjoying this, and more fool them, I cannot understand anyone who enjoyed the trailer, and the concept of this cast telling this story, somehow not appreciating the final result. Even if they don’t love it as much as me.

9/10

If you have enjoyed this, or any other, review on the blog then do consider the following ways to show your appreciation. A subscription/follow costs nothing.
It also costs nothing to like/subscribe to the YouTube channel attached to the podcast I am part of - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErkxBO0xds5qd_rhjFgDmA
Or you may have a couple of quid to throw at me, in Ko-fi form - https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews

Netflix And Chill: Senior Year (2022)

I have been someone who, for a few years now, has gone against the majority opinion when it comes to Rebel Wilson. I actually think that she's good at what she does. Well, I used to think that. I am now, belatedly, coming to agree with the people who dislike her film appearances. Just a quick glance over her recent movie roles is enough to show that the bad far outweighs the good. And Senior Year is one of the bad ones.

In a standard ridiculous movie concept, Stephanie is a young woman who managed to turn herself from uncool nerd to super-popular cheerleader captain, with the boyfriend she always wanted and her life unfolding exactly the way she wanted it. That all changes when a cheerleading move leads to her being comatose for twenty years. When she finally wakes up, Stephanie (now played by Rebel Wilson) struggles to adjust. It was just moments ago that she was about to become Prom Queen. She still wants that. She wants her moment. But a lot of things have changed. Her friend, Martha (Mary Holland), is now the school principal. Another friend, Seth (Sam Richardson), works at the school. Both would like to help Stephanie adjust, but both find themselves disappointed and unsurprised when she starts to fall back into very bad habits, spurred on by social media and a desperate need to right the ship that sailed away without her twenty years ago.

Written by Andrew Knauer, Arthur Pielli, and Brandon Scott Jones, the biggest problem with Senior Year is the fact that the central character is too thoroughly unpleasant. That's sometimes all well and good, especially when you expect a predictable bit of redemption and some lessons learned in the third act, but this is a film that doesn't really rectify anything that way. It tries to make it look that way, but it doesn't. So you have someone who has, for the most part, acted like an asshat to many people around her, and she avoids any punishment that feels proportionate to her actions.

Director Alex Hardcastle has a pretty easy job, keeping Wilson as the focus while things move from one scene utilising a pop hit and some nostalgia to the next scene . . . often utilising a pop hit and some nostalgia. The fact that it all ends with the kind of sing-and-dancealong moment usually shoehorned in at the end of an animated family flick maybe indicates how much he underestimates anyone choosing to view this. The problems may have come from the script, but Hardcastle just seeming to go along with everything really compounds them.

Wilson is Wilson. This isn't a good role for her, but she has moments where she gets to deliver her usual schtick, which can lead to an occasional chuckle. Thankfully, the supporting cast are much better, with Holland once again stealing the show (she was also great in Happiest Season) and Richardson very sweet and funny as the friend who has long held a candle for Stephanie. Zoë Chao is the high school nemesis who has grown up and starts off by pretending that the past is left in the past (spoiler - it's not), Justin Hartley is very funny as Blaine, her husband who was once dating Stephanie, and Chris Parnell plays a typically wonderful movie dad. Other good turns come from Avantika and Joshua Colley, students who befriend Stephanie when she rejoins high school, and Jade Bender, playing the daughter of the old high school nemesis who is manipulated by her mother into competing with someone she doesn't want to compete with.

I really disliked the first third of this, the middle section was a bit better, and I can't say that I completely hated the third act while everything was playing out. Thinking about it more though, as the terrible musical sequence was playing out, I started to resent giving it my time. I feel bad for contributing to whatever viewing figures are collected for these streaming releases, and I hope others don't make my mistake. Although it's not irredeemably awful, this is bad. I hope those who still managed to make the most of their roles are rewarded by some better movie options in their near future. And I hope that the director and writers seriously consider their approach to the medium before their next project.

4/10

If you have enjoyed this, or any other, review on the blog then do consider the following ways to show your appreciation. A subscription/follow costs nothing.
It also costs nothing to like/subscribe to the YouTube channel attached to the podcast I am part of - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCErkxBO0xds5qd_rhjFgDmA
Or you may have a couple of quid to throw at me, in Ko-fi form - https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews

Netflix And Chill: Isn't It Romantic (2019)

When I first heard about Isn't It Romantic I thought that it was going to cover the same ground as They Came Together. It wasn't. Instead, I got something that felt like a cross between I Feel Pretty and The Final Girls (which was, funnily enough, also from this director, Todd Strauss-Schulson).

Rebel Wilson plays a young woman named Natalie. Natalie is an architect, although a lot of people around her seems to treat her as a general dogsbody. Natalie is also quite the cynic, and has been taught from a young age (as we see in the opening scene) to always keep in mind that rom-coms are just nonsense, full of things that would never happen to someone like herself. Which makes it worse when, one day after struggling with a mugger and running into a metal beam, Natalie wakes up in hospital, and wakes up in the middle of what seems to be her own romantic comedy. Will this allow her to learn some kind of valuable lesson, or is it just going to be an endurance test until she can figure out a way back to normality.

A lot of Rebel Wilson performances depend very much on how you feel about Rebel Wilson. I tend to enjoy her work but each subsequent movie highlights the fact that she always plays things the same way. That can work, and you could say the same of her male co-star here (Adam Devine, who plays the smug moron-cum-douchebag in 90% of the movies he has done), but it's not something to rely on forever. She's fine here, and given decent support from a core group that includes Devine (the best friend who might end up being more than that), Liam Hemsworth (very . . .  "beguiling" . . .  as the hunky love interest), Priyanka Chopra (woman who Devine falls for, providing standard complication), Betty Gilpin (friendly work colleague in the real world, acidic workplace enemy underused in the rom-com world), and Brandon Scott Jones (popping up to be the subgenre-requisite gay BFF).

No one in the cast stands out as a bad choice. The big problem here lies elsewhere. The script. Written by Erin Cardillo, Dana Fox, and Katie Silberman, Isn't It Romantic has some funny and clever moments here and there, especially when it comes to censored swearing and transitions that imply sex without showing anything happening, but everything centres on a central idea that doesn't work. Wilson knows all of the tropes, and rolls her eyes at all of them, yet she goes along with them all while commenting on her displeasure. This allows the film to underline everything in every scene, making it less fun. Not only do viewers have everything spoon-fed to them while being bashed on the head with a rom-com rubber mallet, they also get constantly reminded that what they're watching is nonsense and (essentially) without any value. Where the movies mentioned in the first paragraph had a certain sweetness and optimism at the heart of them, whether you liked them or not, this has a cynicism in line with the main character, and that sours what could have been a very enjoyable rom-com that wore some layers of cool meta clothing.

Strauss-Schulson does a good job with the direction, ensuring that this always feels like your standard rom-com, from the visual style of each scene to frequent use of uplifting pop standards on the soundtrack. The film feels infused by every modern rom-com, helped there by the script, but nothing can quite outweigh the misjudged tone. I would have liked to laugh along with this film, instead it feels like they're pointing at things for you to laugh at.

There are laughs to be had, and a couple of fun musical numbers, but this is ultimately a disappointment, despite making a very good point during the grand finale.

5/10

Americans may order it here.