The Unbear­able Weight of Mas­sive Talent

Nico­las Cage is the per­fect actor for the age of the meme. His long career and expres­sive per­for­mance style have made him a main­stay of inter­net cul­ture, arguably since he starred in the wide­ly-mocked remake of The Wick­er Man in 2006. To set foot on the inter­net in 2022 is to under­stand you’re nev­er more than a few clicks away from a Nic Cage gif, be it of his lus­cious locks blow­ing in the breeze in Con Air or pos­ing as a mad priest in the open­ing of Face/​Off. These images, shorn from their con­text, have giv­en the impres­sion of Cage as some gurn­ing mani­ac who makes a lot of movies, most of which are not very good.

Of course, any sea­soned schol­ar of Cage will tell you this is a poor rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the career he’s had, span­ning some 40 years and just about every genre you can think of. He’s one of the hard­est work­ing men in Hol­ly­wood, and through­out the memes, direct-to-DVD clangers and tabloid head­lines, has main­tained an admirable com­mit­ment to his craft. The release of Tom Gormican’s The Unber­able Weight of Mas­sive Tal­ent draws on the mythos of Cage, as he plays a light­ly-fic­tion­alised ver­sion of him­self, who – short on funds – takes a per­son­al appear­ance gig at a shady billionaire’s birth­day party.

It’s sur­pris­ing that the film didn’t come soon­er, con­sid­er­ing the endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of Cage, but the tim­ing couldn’t be bet­ter con­sid­er­ing the hot streak he’s been on in recent years, with Mandy and Pig wide­ly con­sid­ered two of his finest per­for­mances to date. Draw­ing on the mythos of Cage, The Unbear­able Weight of Mas­sive Tal­ent plays as a sort of great­est hits pack­age, ref­er­enc­ing past roles includ­ing Wild at Heart, Leav­ing Las Vegas, and uh, The Croods 2.

This nos­tal­gia trip is pack­aged with­in a fair­ly rote action-com­e­dy plot, in which drug baron and Cage super­fan Javi Gutier­rez (Pedro Pas­cal) comes a crop­per of his men­ac­ing cousin Lucas (Paco León) while CIA agents Vivian (Tiffany Had­dish) and Mar­tin (Ike Bar­in­holtz) try to recruit Cage to spy on Javi for them.

The film clear­ly comes from a place of love, designed to appeal to Cage fans who enjoy being able to pick out the var­i­ous overt or covert ref­er­ence to his vast fil­mog­ra­phy, and the chem­istry between Cage and Pas­cal is easy and enjoy­able. It’s far from the worst mate­r­i­al that Cage has ever sold us on-screen, but it still feels like this self-con­scious­ly meta film miss­es the mark in cap­tur­ing what makes him such a com­pelling fig­ure with­in Hol­ly­wood mythos.

The whis­tle-stop tour of Cage ref­er­ences tends towards his most famous roles rather than some Nic deep cuts. Most glar­ing is the deci­sion to have ​‘Nicky’ (the fig­ment of Cage’s imag­i­na­tion who appears as Sailor Rip­ley to give his real-life coun­ter­part career advice) dressed in a Wild at Heart t‑shirt, as if the film doesn’t quite trust audi­ences to under­stand the film that is being ref­er­enced. While Con Air and Face/​Off might be fan favourites, these ref­er­ences do feel a lit­tle over­done. Sim­i­lar­ly, a recur­ring joke about Padding­ton 2 feels like it was designed pure­ly to be screen­shot­ted and post­ed on Twit­ter – one of the more heinous crimes a film can com­mit in the mod­ern age.

While it’s high time Cage got some recog­ni­tion for his graft, there’s noth­ing in The Unbear­able Weight of Mas­sive Tal­ent that one couldn’t learn from read­ing the recent spate of insight­ful Cage pro­files, or even bet­ter, his delight­ful Red­dit AMA, which reveals Cage as a thought­ful cinephile who dreams of play­ing Jules Verne’s Cap­tain Nemo. This per­son­al­i­ty feels mut­ed in the film, which is curi­ous giv­en its posi­tion­ing as the ulti­mate cel­e­bra­tion of every Nico­las Cage.

It’s an easy watch – even a most­ly enjoy­able one, thanks to the great time Cage and Pas­cal are clear­ly hav­ing – but the dia­logue stum­bles into cheesy ter­ri­to­ry more often than not, and over­all it feels like a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a bold­er state­ment about the ruth­less­ness of the Hol­ly­wood machine, or indeed Cage’s endur­ing celebri­ty. Nev­er­the­less, if it inspires audi­ences to seek out The Vampire’s Kiss or Adap­ta­tion, it won’t have been in vain.