Chris McKay

In Renfield (2023), Nicolas Cage gives Dracula grand vowels and wounded vanity, while Nicholas Hoult plays the familiar who has to put up with him. McKay, directing and producing, has a comic pairing worth staying with, then keeps them apart for most of the film. We laughed at Cage’s Dracula because those grand vowels make his wounded vanity all the more ridiculous. There is a good comedy here whenever McKay lets these two get on with it.

McKay’s earlier work makes that impatience more puzzling. After directing and editing television animation, he served as animation co-director and editor on The Lego Movie (2014), directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. His solo feature directorial debut, The Lego Batman Movie (2017), was a fast, dense parody with a clear sense of what it was doing. It did not need to slow down to make its jokes count.

The Tomorrow War (2021) marked the move into live-action features, with Renfield following it. There is a recognisable interest beneath the change of format: the Batman–Joker dependence and the Renfield–Dracula workplace relationship both concern people who cannot get free of one another. That is a promising subject for a comic director, because irritation can keep producing fresh jokes. But Renfield also wants to be a superhero origin and a crime thriller. McKay gives each too little attention, abandoning one kind of comedy before it has properly developed.

He also has a story credit on Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023), directed by Daley and Goldstein. Its smaller scenes, especially five people bickering in a graveyard, work better than its loud, grey spectacle. That is a more satisfying film than Renfield, though the credit gives us no grounds to claim its best jokes as McKay’s. We would happily watch Cage and Hoult together again; another crime plot would not be necessary.