a review of 雷恩菲尔德

HOOPTOBER ORIGINS 2.0 NIGHT TWENTY-EIGHT: Part of me wishes that this movie had been given a chance to remain as the small-budget studio comedy it wanted to be, instead of receiving the obvious last-minute budgetary infusion to make it into the quasi-superhero action-comedy it became, because I think I would have liked that movie better. Cage and Hoult are blameless here, and I wish we'd seen more of them directly interacting instead of that relationship happening offscreen. The weird New Orleans gangster plot and the mystery/romance with Awkwafina's character felt completely tacked on. On one hand, the Dracula/Renfield plot threatened to be a less-insightful version of what we get from Nandor/Guillermo every week on What We Do in the Shadows, but I don't know if moving away from the relationship comedy aspects of that in favor of popping heads like a Deadpool sequel was what this needed. I had a lot more fun watching this one in the theater than I did thinking about it later, and that's a shame.