Directed by Tom Gormican
Written by Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten
Starring Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Lily Sheen, Sharon Horgan
With mounting bills and no roles on the horizon, Hollywood legend Nic Cage (Nicolas Cage) accepts a high paying job to spend a weekend at a rich fan’s birthday. However when Cage gets to know Javi (Pedro Pascal), the two bond over their mutual love of cinema and become fast friends. It’s a pity that the CIA have a different view of Javi and try to enlist Cage to spy on the suspected drug kingpin and kidnapper, throwing the action star into real life danger.
The draw for this comedy action film is obvious, it’s Nicolas…Fucking…Cage (Wooo!). The screenplay allows the screen icon to go over the top playing a larger than life version of himself, and honestly, that’s worth the price of admission alone. Cage has often been a magnetic presence on the screen, and here he uses it to poke fun at himself, his career, and the whole Hollywood system. The result is at times howlingly funny, but with an undertone of tongue in cheek respect to both cinema and the acting process, even as it delivers a devastating roast.
It helps that Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten’s script lets us in on the joke with the “film within the film”, loudly spelling out exactly what the movie is. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a two-handed character study with a Hollywood hook, but it plays best when it is working that character study angle. Pascal and Cage play beautifully off each other as two friends with a passion for film and an encyclopaedic knowledge of Cage’s work, both hiding a secret from the other. By comparison the action elements seem much more cliched and lifeless, but as stated are really just the structure upon which to hang the rest of the film upon. As such, the film is stronger in the first act and a little flabby in the third, but the pure joy of seeing Cage and Pascal bounce off each other is more than enough to keep watching.
A metatextual romp with the draw card completely on board with the joke, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent falls somewhere between somewhere between Being John Malkovich and The Last Action Hero in terms of comparable genre pieces. It’s neither the instant indie classic of the former, nor the clunky ( albeit underappreciated) tonally jarring mess of the latter – but it’s a wild ride, nevertheless.
