SXSW 2022 Film Review: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Nicolas Cage tours his greatest hits with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage in Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Plumbing the shallower end of the “meta” pool for an irreverent, sweet-natured action comedy, the film explores the multitudes within the celebrated actor’s storied career. Cage delivers crowd-pleasing laughs — working best when sharing the screen with Pedro Pascal — that reminds audiences that he’s always been a movie star. Minor spoilers ahead…
Nicolas Cage contains multitudes. Throughout his illustrious career, he has been a respected thespian, a bonafide action hero, and a walking meme. With his idiosyncratic performances and his penchant for taking any role that floats his way, Cage has set himself up as an easy target of the pop culture zeitgeist, but the last decade in particular has produced some of his most assured - and also some of his most outlandish - work. From the sublime gut-punch of last year’s Pig, to the gore-splattered vengeance of Mandy, to the body-mangling horrors of Color Out of Space, to the otherworldly absurdity of Prisoners of a Ghostland, the last few years have more than proven his breadth of talent. Don’t call it a comeback; Nicolas Cage never left. And what better way to celebrate him than Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent? A film where Cage plays Cage, it mashes together uproarious buddy comedy with a half-baked crime caper, all the while paying glorious tribute to the good, the bad, and the ludicrous of Cage’s career.
In the world of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, fiction mirrors reality as this Nicolas Cage also finds himself in massive debt, poking fun at his real-life counterpart’s penchant for extravagant spending. With a ballooning deficit and a looming divorce, Cage is looking for any opportunity to keep afloat when his agent (Neil Patrick Harris) tells him of an odd but seemingly easy way to make a quick buck: a wealthy olive oil baron, Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal), is a superfan, and he’s willing to fork over a cool million dollars as an appearance fee for the aging star. As it turns out, the CIA has also identified the happy-go-lucky Javi as a dangerous drug lord, and it isn’t before long that two agents (Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz) conscript Cage into a dangerous spy game to bring down his unwitting host.
“Where the film could have easily punched down with jabs at Cage’s real-life foibles and his animated performances, it instead chooses earnest and fleet reverence.”
As Cage and Javi begin to form a bond, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent settles into an uproarious groove that courses through the actor’s formidable ouevre. Where the film could have easily punched down with jabs at Cage’s real-life foibles and his animated performances, it instead chooses earnest and fleet reverence. Talent never truly taps into the potential for introspection that comes with Cage’s rich personality and deep library of work, but the mix of crowd-pleasing references and easy chemistry between the two leads keep everything afloat; Cage and Pascal - the buddies at the center of this buddy comedy - put in the work. The movie works best as a hangout flick, as two fast friends vibe amidst a cavalcade of tributes to Cage’s career: Words from Con-Air are mouthed, a grotesque de-aged Cage named “Nicky” prods the aging actor with deranged provocations, and Javi has a whole collection of memorabilia ranging from the shimmering axe from Mandy to a life-sized maquette of the actor from Face/Off, complete with a pair of the character’s iconic golden guns. And you can’t help but laugh when Cage appeals to his CIA handlers that his “nouveau-shamanic acting ability” can discern what a good guy Javi actually is
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent clearly has a better handle on its laid-back comedy than its action beats. There’s nothing quite like Cage and Javi together professing their love for cinema (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Film Twitter favorite Paddington 2) or finding themselves increasingly mired in island hijinks, but when it comes to its crime caper elements, Talent falls onto the slipshod crutches of predictability. Not even the talents of Haddish nor Barinholtz can elevate the film’s more generic, sleepy half. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is far from a meaningful dissection of what it means to be the legend that is Nicolas Cage, but it’s undoubtedly a great time, and perhaps it drives home a core tenet of Cage and his works: From his worst to his absolute best, everything is better with him in it.
