The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)
Directed by Tom Gormican
Creatively unfulfilled and facing financial ruin, Nick Cage must accept a $1 million offer to attend the birthday of a dangerous superfan. Things take a wildly unexpected turn when Cage is recruited by a CIA operative and forced to live up to his own legend, channeling his most iconic and beloved on-screen characters in order to save himself and his loved ones.
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They also pepper in hilarious nods to lesser-known films like Guarding Tess with Shirley MacLaine.
It opens with a clip from Con Air , contains tongue-in-cheek nods to The Croods 2 , Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Guarding Tess , and features a scene packed with Cage-flavoured props, from Mandy ’s chainsaw to the twin gold guns from Face/Off .
They're here for its true focus: Piling in as many self-reflexive Cage nods as possible, including having the man repeat some of his most famous dialogue and startle himself while watching himself in "Guarding Tess."
You don’t have to be a Cage enthusiast on the scale of Javi to appreciate the film, with most of the wink-wink references relegated to name-drops of popular titles, or Cage resolutely affirming the underrated status of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or Guarding Tess .
It's even more accessible than Entourage, because Unbearable Weight references mainstream movies that people have seen, such as Con Air, The Rock, National Treasure and to a lesser extent, Guarding Tess.
"Massive Talent" is a house of mirrors where he's able to poke fun at himself, his persona and his career, and there are references to his gonzo work in "Moonstruck," "Leaving Las Vegas," "Face/Off," "National Treasure," "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" ("underrated for sure," Cage quips), "Croods 2" and more.
Where Nic sulks over a meeting that ended in a whimper, Nicky is fired up, flipping his floppy hair and wiggling in his leather jacket and yelling the reminder that they are " Nic fuckiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing Cage! " With some CGI smoothing, Cage is made to look younger, perhaps harkening to the '80s, when he was firing audiences up as the hot-tempered stud of Moonstruck or the voracious creep of Vampire's Kiss.
He has a lot of fun with this one, stuffing the screenplay with Cageian references from Moonstruck to The Croods 2 .
There is a smattering of soft-centred references to a few Cage films ( The Rock ; Moonstruck ), Cage is visited by a younger version of himself and Javi has a museum dedicated to him.
But with all the hysterical nods to the actor’s previous works, as well as through embracing his perceived quirkiness (and desire for scenes in which he can freak out unreservedly), it’s difficult not to recommend this flick to anyone who has followed the star’s career – from such acclaimed comedies and romances like “Raising Arizona” and “Moonstruck” to his Oscar-winning turn in “Leaving Las Vegas” to his action hero transformation in “The Rock” and “Con Air” to the riveting weirdness of “Mom and Dad” and “Mandy.”
His unlikely action star status is also continually referenced, especially the holy trilogy of The Rock , Con Air and Face/Off .
It opens with a clip from Con Air , contains tongue-in-cheek nods to The Croods 2 , Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Guarding Tess , and features a scene packed with Cage-flavoured props, from Mandy ’s chainsaw to the twin gold guns from Face/Off .
It’s a fitting tribute to the over-the-top action flicks that its star was known for in the 1990s; it’s no “Con Air,” but it absolutely took notes from “Con Air.”
From opening with a scene from “Con Air” to countless references to the majority of his oeuvre, “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” is an undeniable love letter to Cage, warts and all.
"Massive Talent" is a house of mirrors where he's able to poke fun at himself, his persona and his career, and there are references to his gonzo work in "Moonstruck," "Leaving Las Vegas," "Face/Off," "National Treasure," "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" ("underrated for sure," Cage quips), "Croods 2" and more.
At the very least, it’s an inspiration for one helluva triple feature idea in Face/Off (1997), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and Paddington 2 (2017).
The movie is equal parts comedy and action thriller, drawing inspiration from a vast catalogue of Nicolas Cage films, from Con Air to Gone in 60 Seconds to Face/Off to Raising Arizona to National Treasure.
Nic's latest, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent , is a reminder to keep remembering that.Written by two Nic nerds, Kevin Etten and Tom Gormican (who also directed), Unbearable Weight uses the highs and otherwise of Cage's 40-year film career and the gaudy financial tribulations of his personal life to concoct a shoot-and-shout action movie of the sort in which the actor himself once loomed large at the world box office (think Con Air , Face/Off , The Rock , etc.).
It opens with a clip from Con Air , contains tongue-in-cheek nods to The Croods 2 , Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Guarding Tess , and features a scene packed with Cage-flavoured props, from Mandy ’s chainsaw to the twin gold guns from Face/Off .
His unlikely action star status is also continually referenced, especially the holy trilogy of The Rock , Con Air and Face/Off .
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The pair cry while watching Paddington 2 , trip on LSD, and yet still become suspicious, even dangerous, to one another, until their misaligned conceptions right themselves.
For a while, Unbearable coasts along on this life-imitating-art-chopping-up-life-for-laughs vibe, giving Cage and Pascal the chance to make a warped, goofy buddy comedy involving dropping acid, tooling around Spain’s coast in a sports car, working on possible screenplay ideas, and bonding over the healing power of Paddington 2. There’s a meaty take on the rabbit holes of fame and the wormholes of fandom slithering just beneath the surface, as well as some brain-tickling ideas about the way that a movie star’s legacy and persona(e) can become a prison.
The two form a genuine connection over movies, from Dr. Caligari to the beauty of Paddington 2.
Everything seems peachy and the two eventually bond over their love of, all things, “Paddington 2” and a hankering to collaborate on a character-driven adult drama, but that’s interrupted by Vivian (Tiffany Haddish) and Martin (Ike Barinholtz), two CIA agents trying to infiltrate Javi and his inner circle.
As The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent sprinkles in winking references to its own structure and twists, I couldn’t help but internally compare it to the excellence of Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty and Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths and come away underwhelmed.
It’s all basically a setup for a movie within a movie (such as in “Last Action Hero” or “Get Shorty,” with the flavor of accidental impersonations like in “North by Northwest”), boasting a delightfully self-aware styling (the script tends to evolve as the characters mull over how their actions might be more engaging in a movie setting) that features countless references to Cage’s past performances.
As for other cinematic touchstones, Cage states or is told more than once that he's a movie star, not an actor, echoing Peter O'Toole's swashbuckling star in "My Favorite Year," which certainly qualifies as good company even if the film doesn't scale those heights.
Not since Spike Jonze’s send-up of John Malkovich’s pomposity in Being John Malkovich (1999) has such a strangely tender homage sought to self-reflexively commend celebrity as in Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent curious reputation, unspooling reality tinged meta analysis on the film industry enrobed in what amounts to a zany spy spoof.
There’s a reason we get used to it so quickly: Movies with a meta dimension have been with us for years — movies like “The Player,” where Robert Altman cast a galaxy of Hollywood stars as their real-life selves, or “Being John Malkovich,” where John Malkovich played John Malkovich, or “Adaptation,” where Cage played Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of the film we happened to be watching.
The result is a perfect little capsule of a movie, like Charlie Kaufman films "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" without the darkness.
He has no interest in breaking his no-laziness streak, especially in his own little “Being John Malkovich.”
Early on, there’s hope this film will achieve something along the lines of Spike Jonez’s mind-bending “Being John Malkovich,” but it plays things relatively safe most of the time.
The conceit – to wed a Being John Malkovich-style experiment to a plot that eventually must also function as a watchable Nicolas Cage action movie – is bold.
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The film is structured around a concept very similar to a film I love deeply called JCVD , in which a weary and down on his luck Jean-Claude Van Damme is caught up in a bank heist and must grapple with everyone’s perception of him as his onscreen persona when he’s not really a bank heist-foiling superhero in real life.
This isn't JCVD, where past-his-prime action-hero Jean-Claude Van Damme looks back on his life with the regrets of a Shakespearean tragic hero.
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.
Just as the makers of Being John Malkovich understood it and Mabrouk El Mechri and his team understood Jean Claude Van Damme when they wrote JCVD – another film to which Unbearable owes a debt.
At the very least, it’s an inspiration for one helluva triple feature idea in Face/Off (1997), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and Paddington 2 (2017).
He keeps trying to force his interests, namely 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, on her, with little regard for who his daughter might actually be.
That persona causes problems for Cage’s family, who are sick and tired of him prioritizing his job over them, and imposing his love of movies like Fritz Lang’s classic 1920 German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on them.