The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

C+

Directed by Tom Gormican

Starring Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, and Sharon Horgan

​Review by Jon Kissel

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​The Nicolas Cage persona has been played to meta effect multiple times in his career, but never so aggressively as in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a self-referential circle that allows Cage to portray the mystery that is himself.  The problem is that for the film people who are this film’s primary audience, Cage isn’t that mysterious.  He’s an actor given to occasional histrionics but also quiet focus, frequently capable of greatness but, thanks to money problems and a readiness to saying yes to questionable projects, has a poor career batting average.  Tom Gormican’s film is less about this one idiosyncratic actor than it is about any actor who experienced massive cultural domination and then watched it fade.  By being specific to Cage’s experience only in reference to his filmography, it becomes a fun but disposable action comedy that no one would include in the ten to fifteen great films/performances of Cage’s career.

The version of himself that Cage plays in the present is a recognizable middle-aged man in decline, though one with a perfectly stable financial life.  Amicably divorced from Olivia (Sharon Horgan), with whom he shares custody of teen daughter Addy (Lily Sheen), Cage is an enthusiastic but attention-hungry father and an actor who can’t get the roles he wants anymore.  Sick of being unable to get the jobs he wants anymore, he swears off acting, but the thing that made him famous provides other sources of income.  A fan wants to pay him a million dollars to hang out in Majorca at his birthday party, and with nothing else to do, Cage agrees.  The fan, Javi (Pedro Pascal), is a good-natured acolyte who loves all movies, not just Cage’s, and over wine, LSD, and Paddington 2, they bond and become friends.  Cage, pestered by a coked-up younger vision of himself that wonders why he isn’t a king like he was in the 90’s, gets the opportunity to reenact one of his heyday action flicks when CIA agents (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz) tell him that Javi is a suspected arms dealer who has kidnapped the daughter of a high-ranking Spanish official.  All of Cage’s stage-fighting instincts and pored-over spy scripts are needed to ascertain Javi’s true motivations and escape his Mediterranean paradise.
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More of a Hollywood satire than any kind of introspective or heightened Cage vehicle a la JCVD, Unbearable Weight’s biggest laughs come from an overestimation of abilities on Cage’s part and for Javi, a desire to believe that Cage is closer to his most famous characters than he really is.  That strong recipe is occasionally revisited by Gormican and co-writer Kevin Etten’s script, but it only ever scratches the surface.  The primary joke is the presence of Nicolas Cage.  It’s an insubstantial structure that leads to an insubstantial film, both for the viewer and the characters.  Shootouts happen, goons are killed, and everything rolls off Cage and every other violence-averse character that gets roped in.  The potential for a Game Night-esque ‘oh, he died’ kind of joke isn’t even engaged with.  Unbearable Weight is a perfectly fine film thanks to the gameness and chemistry of Cage and Pascal, but it’s only a little less empty than one of the money laundering schemes passing themselves off as movies that pepper Cage’s imdb page.  C+