Review: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)

Dan Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent completes the memeification of Nicolas Cage, a talented actor who has, over the past couple of decades, become more cartoon than human in the popular consciousness. Signing on to seemingly every direct-to-video action film offered him, with the occasional arthouse work thrown in for good measure (such as last year’s Pig), Cage has embraced his public persona as a gonzo “neo-shamanic” performer—his words—and fueled the next act of a career that had seemed to have run its course in the mid-2010s. 

Gormican’s film taps into this new public perception of Cage even as it gently investigates whether such an approach is fair to an actor as talented and hard-working as Cage. It’s a well-meaning film that has just enough metatextual elements and introspection to compensate for its frustratingly (and deliberately) conventional plotting. Oh, and it has a wonderful, scene-stealing performance by Pedro Pascal that transforms the film into an appealing buddy flick.

In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage plays Nick Cage, a loosely-fictionalized version of himself who has fallen on hard times. He’s recently divorced from his wife (Sharon Horgan), has a fraying relationship with his teen daughter (Lily Sheen), and is struggling to book meaningful roles, despite the best efforts of his agent (Neil Patrick Harris). 

In the opening scene, we see evidence of Cage’s desperation as he tries to get David Gordon Green (playing himself) to cast him as a Boston tough guy in his new film, even breaking into an impromptu line reading for the part at the fancy Los Angeles restaurant where they’re dining. It’s one of many moments in the film where Cage goes “full Cage” to the horror of on-screen characters and the delight of the film’s intended audience. The tagline in television advertisements for the movie claimed The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was the “most Nicolas Cage movie ever,” so you can tell the filmmakers and Cage are all-in on marketing to the online Nicolas Cage cult. Cage even argues and is taunted by an imaginary, leather jacket-clad younger version of himself circa Wild at Heart, who yelps and cajoles and unleashes “Nic Cage energy” on the real, older actor. He’s haunted by his own performative excesses, literally.

In debt and locked out of the hotel room where he’s living, Cage is offered a chance to clear his debts when a Spanish billionaire, Javi Gutierrez (Pascal), offers him $1 million to appear at his birthday party at his mansion on the island of Majorca. Cage reluctantly accepts and finds himself bonding with Javi over their love of movies and Javi’s love of Cage as a performer. But Cage’s new friendship with Javi is tested when CIA agents (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz) appear and tell Cage that Javi is a mob boss, and that they need Cage’s help to rescue a girl held hostage in his compound.

As you can already tell from this plot set-up, the film is divided between being an introspective look at the career of an eclectic actor and a goofy crime comedy about a Hollywood actor who’s in over his head. It’s much more successful at one than the other, despite its best intentions to incorporate a knowing takedown of its own conventional plotting into the film itself. To poke fun at its own plotting, the film has Javi present Cage with a screenplay he wrote that he wants Cage to star in. Cage decides that instead, he and Javi should write the screenplay together, and over the course of the film, they hash out plot ideas and discuss genre conventions, tonal shifts, and the idea that commercial plotting can ruin personal artistic works.

Their brainstorming sessions even incorporate psychedelics, with Cage and Javi driving down the Majorcan coastline, high out of their minds, grinning like nutcases, spinning ideas to each other as they dangerously drift down the road. It’s a humorous scene—in fact, so is most any scene where it’s just Cage and Pascal hanging out, goofing around, getting drunk, referencing Cage’s career, or discussing their favourite movies, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Paddington 2. These moments are made even better by Pedro Pascal’s bright-eyed, boyish enthusiasm for Cage, grinning like a kid who’s met his idol whenever playing opposite him. The man is a star, charismatic, confident, self-deprecating, but never losing his charm in the midst of his pratfalls and shenanigans.

However, the film grows tiresome as it develops the crime plotline, even if it tries to have its cake and eat it too as it incorporates moments of Cage and Javi questioning whether having a crime subplot or action sequences in their screenplay would distract from a film meant to showcase Cage’s talent as an actor. It’s obvious that Gormican and co-writer Kevin Etten are winking at the viewer here, letting us in on the fact that they know the gangster plot and the shootouts and car chase climax are ridiculous and overly commercial. It’s all tongue-in-cheek and obvious “meta” in the way that so much entertainment is these days, from Rick and Morty to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

And yet, despite how undercooked this element of the film is, it’s oddly fitting for this movie to be plotted this way. It reconciles the two sides of Nicolas Cage’s career: action star and dramatic actor, direct-to-video leading man and Oscar-winning indie darling. So it’s fitting for the “most Nicolas Cage movie ever” to be part commercial caper, part indie meta-commentary. The appeal of the film is watching Nicolas Cage play himself and comment upon his work in reaction to the kinds of choices that have made him famous as an actor. That’s the whole joke, but as Matt Lynch writes in his review, “it’s thankfully a funny enough joke to justify the film’s existence.”

Nicolas Cage is an entertaining performer. Pedro Pascal is a charming star on the rise. Watching them hang out together for a little under two hours is a fun enough way to spend an evening, especially if you have affection for all the Nicolas Cage-isms that make his performances so energetic. You know where the film is headed, but of course you do. At this point in his career, a “Nicolas Cage movie” is a genre unto itself. And therein lies this film’s appeal.

6 out of 10

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022, USA)

Directed by Tom Gormican; written by Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten; starring Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Sharon Horgan, Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz, Alessandra Mastronardi, Jacob Scipio, Neil Patrick Harris.

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