By all accounts, Renfield flopped last weekend, which is understandable, but it's a funny sort of fuck-up: a major studio comedy that troubles to find its own visual aesthetic (shoutout to Rob Renfield's multicoloured comeback sweater, early frontrunner as 2023's Most Desirable Wardrobe Item), but also labours through far too many competing ideas than is healthy for a 93-minute picture. Director Chris McKay adopts much the same approach as he did in 2017's The Lego Batman Movie, spitballing frantically and lobbing whatever's to hand at the screen, only to a point where the new film quickly begins overwriting itself, and losing sight of what's funniest. The A, B and C plots in Ryan Ridley's script are at least semi-diverting, but they don't criss-cross gracefully, as they would on TV, so much as stumble repeatedly over one another, jamming up any hope one might have of getting on this precise wavelength. Granted, McKay's live-action animation approach pays off in the stunt sequences: here, you feel the film cracking its knuckles, and having the fun it wants us to have. (It also allows us to witness Hoult doing extraordinary things with a man's severed arms.) But what's in between can't fully work itself out: it's like some awkward crossover episode involving characters from The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and What We Do in the Shadows. (And it's too busy rushing through its multiple narrative pile-ups to allow its actors to be properly funny, as Awkwafina is on Nora from Queens and Hoult really is on The Great.) It gives good, imaginative splatter, but the issue isn't with arterial spray as with the chaotic framework it's been hosed over. You come away with a renewed appreciation for the brisk clarity of plotting and hyper-efficient gag delivery of our best sitcoms; set against those, Renfield seems... well, clotted.
Renfield is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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