‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’ and Pulling Your Punches
There was too much talent and not enough massive.
Incredibly famous people having a sense of humor about themselves is always attractive1. It’s very easy to assume that A-list movie stars are creepy, pampered homunculi, the sort of lizard people who eat babies in order to remain youthful and have indigents helicoptered to their private island in order to hunt the Most Dangerous Game2. I mean, look into Tom Cruise’s crazy eyes and tell me you would doubt for a second that this man eats babies3.
So whenever a big star makes fun of themselves, it’s delightful—both because it shows them to be at least passably human, and because it connects them to us intimately. After all, if Nicolas Cage is aware of how he’s perceived in the world, that means that at some point both you and Nick were gazing at the same NOT THE BEES meme, and thus shared a secret moment4.
As a result I was excited to see The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which looked like a meta delight. Nick Cage playing “Nick Cage” and making jokes about his ludicrous spending habits, penchant for strange line deliveries, and desperate financial situation5? Nick Cage playing a version of himself who hallucinates a younger version of himself named Nicky who is dressed and styled like his character in Wild at Heart? My god, I thought, this will be the greatest movie ever made.
Narrator: It is not the greatest movie ever made.
You're Nick FUCKIIIIIIIIING Cage!
Which is not to say that The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a bad movie. It’s ... pretty good? It’s entertaining, and it has spirit, and there are a few terrific moments. Like when Nicky tries to remind Nick just how great he is:
The basic plot is simple enough: Cage plays a fictional version of himself who has blown through all his money, is losing traction with his ex-wife (the brilliant Sharon Horgan) and estranged daughter (Lily Mo Sheen), and is contemplating quitting acting altogether after he fails to land a dream role6. Depressed and financially desperate, he agrees to a $1 million appearance fee to show up in Mallorca at Javi Gutierrez’s (Pedro Pascal) birthday party. Javi is a billionaire drug lord (or so everyone thinks), and Cage is drafted by a pair of U.S. agents (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz) to use his access to Javi and his compound to help them find a kidnapped girl7.
Yes, this harebrained plot allows Cage to riff on the whole due-playing-a-dude-disguised-as-another-dude deal as he ping pongs from cowardly panic to puffed-up confidence in his attempts to play secret agent8. And as I said: Some terrific moments, like when Cage discovers a life-size statue of him dressed as his Face/Off character:
Nick Cage : Is that supposed to be me? It's ... grotesque.
<silence>
Nick Cage : I'll give you $20,000 for it9.
So far, so mildly entertaining. The story makes little sense and tries for almost no believability, because the whole point is that we’re supposed to groove on Cage’s crazy energy and the joke that he’s really just a middle-aged dude enduring a midlife crisis who has a lot of nutty ideas. Except the script won’t commit to this, because it makes a fatal mistake: It tries to make Nick Cage normal.
I Must Trust My Shamanic Instincts as a Thespian
Look, I’m sure in reality Nick Cage is a pretty nice guy and that spending time with him is a relatively normal and pleasant experience. But that is not what I paid $3.99 to watch this film for. The entire premise of a story like this is that Nick Cage is bonkers and then gets into a situation that’s even more bonkers than he is. But the story works overtime to reduce the bonkers quotient. Instead, this fictional Cage is presented as a caring, doting father who’s main failing is a level of self-regard beyond most mortals10. He’s a serious artist suffering because he can’t get good work. And he’s a fairly reasonable person who doesn’t want to be a hero, but cannot walk away when innocent people are in trouble.
The utter reasonableness of Nick Cage in this film—his Nicky hallucinations aside—undercuts the main joke of the film, which is that Nick Cage is being forced to behave like a character from one of his films11. Instead of watching Nick Cage, out of touch and possibly insane artistic genius be forced to infiltrate a drug lord’s organization and risk his life, we instead see Nick Cage, mildly depressed professional actor who is moderately self-aware do these things. It just doesn’t have quite the same comedic bite.
The mistake here is pulling back from the concept. In a story that’s predicated on a character being outrageous—whether they’re a famous real person or completely fictitious—you have to be willing to actually lean into the outrageous part. Pulling back and humanizing them too soon reduces your story to its bones, and when the whole point was the outrageous character the chances that your story has interesting bones are ... low. The bones of the story in Massive Talent are the soft, bird-like bones of complete farce, for example, and once Nick Cage stops being, well, Nick FUCKIIIIIIIIING Cage12 all you’re left with is a dumb story about incompetent federal agents recruiting a bloated actor to do spy stuff he’s not very good at, with a parallel story about two middle-aged men who becomes best friends, escape a violent drug lord, and make a movie together, which is not nearly as interesting as it sounds.
In other words: Always go full Nick Fucking Cage. Always. When it comes to outrageous characters, moderation is death. If you’re going to hire baby-eating lizard person Tom Cruise to play an outrageous parody (?) of a Hollywood producer, for example, you go full Nick Fucking Cage and people are still talking about it a decade later.
Do I also hallucinate a 20-year old version of myself who constantly yells abuse at me? Of course13. Wait ... do you not?
Next week: Daisy Jones and The Lame Lyrics Review
When I become famous, however, I plan to punish anyone who would dare mock me. Yes, based on prior experience that will require a lot of punishing. I’m up for it.
Coincidentally, this also describes my general life plan after becoming famous.
Tom Cruise’s energy is that of a guy who’s been doing cocaine for three days straight who keeps demanding that you punch him in the stomach because he is invulnerable.
Honestly, the whole “NOT THE BEES” thing is the only reason anyone remembers that execrable remake of The Wicker Man, thus demonstrating Nick Cage’s power.
Although it’s weird for the dollar amounts to be so low in this film. This is 2022 and they’re acting like $1 million is a fancifully huge amount of money. There are people in this country who’s student loans dwarf that.
This part of the film actually landed for me: Cage does a good job playing a man bewildered that all his usual tricks no longer work. He’s like a wizard who keeps pointing his wand at things and shouting girgol and nothing happens. I do imagine it’s disorienting to remember being considered a genius and suddenly finding yourself unable to get arrested in this town.
If it’s a teenager, it’s always a kidnapped girl, never a kidnapped boy. It can be a boy if they’re younger than a teenager, but once a boy turns 13 apparently they are no longer good for kidnapping macguffins.
I did appreciate that Fictional Cage arrives at the luxe home of this drug lord and never hesitates to dive into the food, drink, and luxurious accommodations, the implication being that he’s had experience being feted simply because he’s famous and he knows the rules.
To be fair, if I discover any of you have a life-size statue of me in your garage, I would also offer to buy it if only to remove the possibility that you’re doing weird sex stuff with it.
Why is everyone looking at me? I assume because I am so attractive <stares into mirror for next 3 hours, smiling dreamily>.
There’s even a weak-kneed Adaptation riff in here and he and Javy discuss good and bad story beats for their film script, most of which then happen exactly as described. But there’s no real reason for this riff, as it’s just there for folks to notice and has little bearing on the story.
Even Little Nicky barely factors into the story, which is just a mistake. Half this film should have been Nic Cage talking to his younger self who gets increasingly incensed at the careful middle-aged plodding Nic Cage engages in, his camera mugging advancing from moderately hilarious to outright disturbing.
He wears a baseball cap and a flannel shirt at all times and his glasses are so large they sometimes accidentally catch the sun and beam a death ray in random directions.
$3.99 ya say? Thanks for the review. Another movie that I was going to see but didn't. I gotta get out more...
I've seen many Nicolas Cage movies but remember just two: "Raising Arizona" (“I’ll be taking these Huggies and whatever cash ya got.”) and "Moonstruck" ("I ain't no freakin' monument to justice! ")
Btw... as to #1... <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukSVypfM6qU">Nothing like a good spanky</a>.