Deep into the intermittently entertaining but largely self-conscious The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Nicolas Cage, playing himself, turns down a lucrative party gig suggested by his agent (Neil Patrick Harris). “Am I a trained seal?” Cage retorts. Director Tom Gormican, who co-wrote the script with Kevin Etten, is being more self-reflexive than he thinks; too much of the film seems like big-budget fan fiction that essentially asks the much-loved actor to roll over and honk crazy, again and again.
The sprawling plot is set in motion with a prelude that depicts a young couple watching an old Nicolas Cage movie—right before the young woman gets kidnapped in a political act that we eventually learn is tied in with the upcoming Presidential election in Mallorca.
Enter Cage, hoping for a chance to read for the role of a lifetime—and Unbearable is on one level the very part for which he’s trying out. But he doesn’t get the role he wants, and reluctantly takes on that trained seal job, which involves a trip to Mallorca, which turns this into a buddy-movie with a superfan (Pedro Pascal) who may be involved with the kidnaping that started this overstuffed ball in motion. Did we mention that CIA agents (including one played by Tiffany Haddish) recruit Cage to help the government rescue the victim that they think is kept somewhere on his host’s compound?
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is kind of the role of a lifetime—since it is about his life, sort of. The script plays up his need to pay bills and his seeming willingness to take on any terrible project put before him.
Early on we get to see Cage spin off into one of his signature rants, and in throwaways like Primal and Rage the scene would be a rare highlight in an otherwise unmemorable genre exercise. The creators of Unbearable figure that the way to maximize the Cage factor in their film is to multiply it; so they deliver much more of that rage. And thanks to several scenes in which the present-day actor has conversations with a CGI’ed Wild at Heart-era Cage, the rant factor is doubled, and then some.
Now, career highlights like Vampire’s Kiss and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans benefit from plenty of extra ham, as well as a coherent vision (yes, even Herzog’s fever dream of a crime movie is coherent). But as Cageaholics have learned from recent films like Mandy (which in any other context is hardly an example of restraint) and especially Pig, the actor is at his best when he detonates the bug-eyed devices more sparingly. So with Unbearable, as the wig-outs accumulate, they lose some power, and instead become pandering—in a movie that already panders to its fanbase shamelessly with frequent callbacks to The Rock and even, somewhere, a nod to Werner Herzog.
To borrow the title from one of his more successful films, this constant self-examination is too Knowing—and, for all its genre-busting ambitions, fairly conventional. What works best are the standard tropes weaved into this meta-mess: the importance of family and friendship, and the power of cinema. And some of the most arresting scenes work by setting Cage against his own type: twice we see Cage simmering quietly during a party scene while revelers dance in slow-motion around him, and those images seem to say more about his self-proclaimed “nouveau shamanism” than a dozen Cage-bombs.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent nearly lives up to its title, and it’s to the star’s credit that it’s at all bearable. It may sell itself as the ultimate Cage show, but the results fail to deliver on that promise.
Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
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