Nicolas Cage is an icon of the internet and prolific actor in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. You may be the right audience for this meta trifle of a comedy if that concept alone puts you in stitches.
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The kind of movie that treats the mere mention of other movies as a punch line is what it is. At one point, the star stumbles upon a shrine to his own output, a long wall of lovingly showcased props and merchandise with his likeness on them, and ends up looking at an unconvincing life-size replica of himself, brandishing the golden pistols from Face/Off. The whole film is about a shrine to the cult of Cage and a room of a movie.
For a while, Cage has been working on a role like this. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a fork in his career path that has allowed him to exploit how fans and detractors alike view his wild-man talents. Those talents were put to little use in recent movies, instead being asked to be Nicolas Cage and stand around. The sales pitch here is more direct: You pay for Nic Cage and he is exactly what you get, without the distraction of a fictional character.
The 2008 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle that cast the Muscles from Brussels as a washed-up version of himself was built by director and co-writer Tom Gormican. An actor with a lot of tough guys on his CV is forced to channel a history of fake violence into the real kind when he is thrust into danger, but not before suffering some professional indign. While the real Cage has two kids and is on his fifth marriage, that has been fictionalized here into a simpler sitcom arrangement, with Catastrophe's Sharon Horgan as his supportive but no-nonsense ex-wife and Lilly Mo Sheen as his frustrated teenage daughter.
Cage was crestfallen about a part he didn't land, and eager to pay off some enormous debts, so he agreed to attend an eccentric billionaire's birthday party on a secluded Spanish island. His host is an effusive superfan played by Pedro Pascal. The comic potential of an actor of Cage's stature and popularity forced to humor a die-hard fan with expectations of how his idol ought to behave off-screen. Unbearable Weight mostly sees an opportunity for kinship between the two, fulfilling a Comic-Con fantasy of meeting your famous Hollywood hero and discovering he's actually just a very generous, thoughtful, down-to-earth dude interested in reading your screenplay.
When the two instant besties start thinking about a project that takes the mutating shape of their own circumstances and creative partnership, they flirt vaguely with the house-of-mirrors laughs of another Cage project, Adaptation. The film is closer in spirit to one of the comedies of the same name, with a cameo by Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green. As it turns out, the CIA has identified Cage's good-natured Javi as a ruthless international drug lord, which requires him to bumble through some painfully unfunny undercover spy games as agents played by Haddish and Barinholtz bark orders at him through a headset.
Cage is familiar with the assignment. The hallmarks of his acting style are put into quotation marks. The star plays himself as a relaxed eccentric who must occasionally meet the demands of the situation with some characteristic bellowing, sobbing, and hip-thrusting. The movie saves his most over-the-top line readings for sporadic conversations with an imaginary doppelgnger. The split-personality device is a throwaway gag.
We are supposed to marvel at what a good sport Cage is here, enduring cracks about how he used to be a bigger star and how he could stand to say no to a project sometimes. These jokes are just like the softballs they use in job interviews when they ask you to identify your biggest weaknesses. The portrait of Cage that emerges is an artist who is devoted to his craft but still humble, a celebrity who is polite to his fans, and a workhorse who does a lot of movies not for the money. He annoys his daughter by being a passionate cinephile who encourages her to watch silent movies. As tongue-in-cheek as the title sounds, it captures the sense that Cage is in fact starring in a love letter to himself.
Maybe he should get one. Even though he is perceived as a lazy check-casher, he still brings an emotional intensity to his work. There is something to be said for making a lot of movies, to not overthink what each will mean in the larger context of your career. As he did last summer in Pig, a film about art, dedication, and celebrity, Cage can still deliver a remarkable performance. Cage knows how his choices have left the court of public opinion divided on his value, with partisans in both. Why don't you eat out with an irreverent wink?
The problem with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent isn't that it's an ego-stroking victory lap. There is a better tribute to Cage's career than the one that consists of starstruck onlookers yelling. It succeeds only in making one appreciate the relative dumb fun of the actor's numerous direct-to-video potboilers, which delivered the goods without so much self-satisfied smirking. The Nicolas Cage fan found himself longing for a Nicolas Cage movie that genuinely utilized his gifts rather than just broadly, witlessly lionizing them after seeing Paddington 2.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent opens on April 22. You can find more reviews and writing by A.A. Dowd on his Authory page.
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