The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent: The Nicolas Cage Experience Goes Meta
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
Just before the turn of the century, Sean Penn uttered damning words about his erstwhile best friend Nicolas Cage. To wit: "Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He's more like a performer."
This many years later, if you offered me the choice between a Sean Penn movie and a Nicolas Cage movie, with no other information, I’d automatically go full Cage. Even if it was the worst movie Cage ever “performed,” you know he’d be all in.
(It is not for nothing that, during filming of The Bad Lieutenant - Port of New Orleans, in lieu of yelling “Action!” Werner Herzog would supposedly yell at Cage, “Release the pig!”)
Javi (Pedro Pascal) and Nicolas Cage talk plot scenarios while driving through Mallorca, Spain
And truly, his is the more interesting career. This is true both of his life (short-lived marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, his weird real estate purchases, naming his kid Kal-El) and career choices – which in recent years have ranged from straight-to-video action films, to cult darlings like Mandy, the bizarre meteor-movie Color Out of Space, or last year’s cruelly overlooked and weirdly contemplative Pig.
Cage has always been in on the jokes. That much is clear in the meta-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, about a barely-working erstwhile star named Nick Cage, who is so desperate to pay his bills, he accepts a gig to be paid $1 million to attend the party of a reputed Spanish arms dealer.
The movie is both an exercise in self-mockery and a spoof of both Hollywood and the kind of movie Cage might take to pay the bills.
It’s not an entirely new concept. Jean-Claude Van Damme did it in 2008, playing himself in the quite good French-language JCVD, as a washed-up action star who finds himself in a real-life we-need-a-hero situation, with unexpected results.
But that was Van Damme. This is Cage. The two meta-movies are as different and specific as fingerprints.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent introduces us to a Cage who is a raging narcissist, who drunkenly hijacks attention at a birthday party for his teenage daughter (Lily Mo Sheen), exasperates his ex-wife (Sharon Horgan) and actively kills his own career with his intense desperation for roles that were already his had he not freaked everybody out.
Meanwhile, he’s haunted by frequent disapproving visits from the ghost of his digitally-younger, punkier self (circa Valley Girl I think).
Enter Javi (Pedro Pascal), a rich, jovial fellow who lives on a massive seaside compound in Mallorca, Spain with a huge staff and security, and who happens to be the world’s biggest Nick Cage fan. The party invite is sincere, though there is an ulterior motive. Javi is a wannabe script writer and wants to make his mark writing a Cage film.
If Javi is a murderous criminal, he hides it well behind his solicitousness and humble demeanor. Nonetheless, Cage is contacted by a couple of CIA agents, Vivian and Martin (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz) who tell him he’s being feted by the kingpin they’ve been trying to nail forever, and who they believe has kidnapped a politician’s teen daughter.
Cage, thus, is urged to build on his friendship with Javi to provide cover for a rescue, with endless script meetings over wine and, at one point, creatively juiced with LSD.
In essence, director Tom Gormican gives us a typically antic spy farce/buddy comedy, with great scenery (it was shot mainly in Croatia) and a plethora of career references – Con Air, Gone in Sixty Seconds, “Not the bees!” from The Wicker Man, and repeated call-backs to Cage’s favourite film, the 1920 silent German psycho-thriller The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
If the last act makes it look like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is actually becoming what it spoofs, there’s a curveball there too.
At the least, it’s a feast for people who’ve never fallen out of love with the Nicolas Cage experience.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Directed by Tom Gormican. Starring Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal and Tiffany Haddish. In theatres Friday, April 22.