The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is in theaters on April 22, 2022.
Having a deep and abiding love for the vast filmography of Nicolas Cage is not an outright requirement for enjoying The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, the pleasingly meta new action comedy from Ghosted co-creator Tom Gormican, but it would certainly help.
After all, this is a movie made specifically for the brand of Cage fan most dedicated to the actor’s body of work. The kind of person I’m talking about is the sort that’s willing to give just about any movie a shot so long as Cage makes an appearance in it; the kind of person who holds the perception that no matter whether the movie is any good or not, you’re likely going to see something novel and/or highly unusual in his performance. Such is the reputation of Cage, 40 years into an acting career that shows no signs of slowing down, and has lost none of the peculiar spirit that’s made him one of Hollywood’s most enduring actors. And while that reputation can sometimes be unfairly boiled down to overly reductive caricature – after all, he’s given as many quiet and emotionally grounded performances as he has ludicrously over-the-top ones – Cage himself has shown no particular interest in changing his trajectory to avoid it. He’s always come across as very much in on the joke, entirely self-aware about how his choices are perceived by the audiences that devour his work, if not specifically courting of that perception.
Yet for all that self-awareness, Cage has never before capitalized on that reputation in the way he does in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a film that puts him in the uncomfortable position of having to play a lightly truthful, but mostly fictionalized version of himself. Unbearable Weight’s vision of Cage is a once great actor now beset by mounting debts and bad choices. His marriage has all but fallen apart, his relationship with his teenage daughter is almost nonexistent, and after failing to get the role he believed would help rekindle his career, he finds himself on the verge of retiring from acting. All that’s left for him is to take a strange offer from Javi Gutierrez, played by the chronically underrated Pedro Pascal. Javi is a wealthy Spanish businessman and Nick Cage superfan who wants the actor to appear at his birthday party for the tidy sum of one million dollars. But when Cage arrives at Javi’s lavish compound, he finds himself torn between a burgeoning friendship with the seemingly kind-hearted, if a touch overenthusiastic fanboy who brought him there, and helping a pair of CIA agents who are adamant that Javi is the mastermind behind a criminal organization and the kidnapping of the Catalan president’s daughter.
On paper, this movie is any Cage obsessive’s dream project. It’s Cage fully embracing both the perception of who he is as a performer, and what people assume about him as a person, and taking both those things to absurd extremes. At the same time, it’s extremely easy to imagine a ruinous version of this movie that demolishes all that goodwill he’s built up over the years. After all, it’s not like there aren’t plenty of examples of actors playing cartoonish self-caricatures, only to end up overshadowed by the joke they’re telling about themselves. Part of the fun of Nicolas Cage is that he’s always kept his fandom’s outsized concept of him at arm’s length from the choices he makes from role to role. He’s never come off like he makes those off-beat choices specifically to rile up his online fandom. If Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent boiled down to nothing more than him playing up the various memes and jokes people have been making about his career for decades, it’d be, well, unbearable.
Thankfully, Unbearable Weight is not that. Well, mostly not. It certainly has its moments of playing to the cheap seats, riffing on Face/Off and The Wicker Man, and featuring possibly the most heartfelt tribute to Guarding Tess ever uttered. But those moments aren’t the bulk of the movie. Instead, Gormican wisely puts the film’s weight on the shoulders of Cage and Pascal. The pair makes for an irresistible combination as Cage slowly warms to Javi’s overwhelming fandom, and Javi basks in the glow of his idol with adorable innocence. Pascal is tremendously funny and sweet here, playing Javi with just the right amount of fanboy glee without teetering over into obnoxiousness. As their friendship develops, you understand why Cage would come around on the guy, let alone find himself riddled with guilt as he tries to suss out Javi’s true motives. The film’s best scenes almost uniformly feature Cage and Pascal, as they bond over their shared love of cinema, or their admiration for each other’s shoes. And most of that comes even before they end up dropping acid together and living out their most addled action movie fantasies.
If the movie sags anywhere, it’s around the edges of its central relationship. Sharon Horgan and Lily Mo Sheen are both quite good as Cage’s estranged wife and daughter, but they aren’t given a great deal to do beyond reacting (mostly) negatively to the antics Cage gets up to throughout the film. The whole CIA plot never finds much traction either, though it’s mostly there to propel Cage into increasingly absurd situations. And that works just fine, especially early on as Cage wobbles his way through stressful attempts at spycraft; his first stealth mission at Javi’s birthday party is one of the film’s highlight sequences. It’s just unfortunate that Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz, playing Cage’s CIA handlers, have so little to work with. Presumably you hire actors like them to deliver jokes, but outside of an extended riff on The Croods 2, their characters are mostly relegated to reaction duty, alternating between yelling instructions to their undercover actor and lamenting how much he sucks at this whole spy thing.
At the same time, it’s hard to imagine anyone coming to Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent for those specific aspects. You’re likely here because Nicolas Cage is doing the Nicolas Cage thing as Nicolas Cage. Whatever reservations he may have had about taking on this project at the outset don’t come across one bit in the final film. He shows a great willingness to poke fun at his own larger-than-life persona, even recreating his iconic Wogan attire to embody a digitally de-aged version of his younger self who haunts him like a Ghost of Youthful Impetuousness Past. His energy, especially alongside Pascal, is infectious, and that energy carries The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent past being a mere curiosity into something pretty memorable. Nothing about this movie would work if Cage couldn’t give himself over entirely to the film’s vision of what it means to be Nicolas Cage. But then again, giving himself over entirely to a role pretty much is what it means to be Nicolas Cage, so maybe there was never anything to worry about.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/1GEmuYC
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