The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

 Tom Gormicon's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent( 2021) is a film that foregrounds characteristics of Nick Cage's acting that have previously been incidental to the movies in which he stars.  Cage often overacts and his performances are so bizarrely expressive that they subvert the films in which he is featured.  For Cage, every line is articulated as a moment of desperate decision, an instance of visionary revelation with words spoken as if pivoting around a narrative climax.  In many of Cage's movies, the actor seems to regard each utterance as a central and climactic moment in the narrative.  These aspects of Cage's persona, more or less incidental to the various action films in which the star has performed (and evident in early pictures like Moonstruck and Peggy Sue Got Married), are made the entire subject of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent until the film devolves into a typical Nick Cage action movie.  For this reason, the picture is about 2/3rd sly, well-scripted, and very funny -- the last third of the movie involves car chases, gun-battles and explosives and seems, oddly enough, tame compared to the preceding narrative.  

Cage plays himself in the film, an actor eager to make a big Hollywood come-back although he denies this very premise:  "I was never away," he persuades himself.  The two aspects of Cage's stage and film persona appear in the movie as a Hollywood star who has seen better days and may be in decline, played with Cage's characteristic hang-dog charm and self-effacing gloom and the actor's younger self, Nicky, a brash insouscient young buck who literally bitch-slaps himself as an older (and wiser) man.  Nicky personifies Cage's wild man schtick and he's equally an embarrassment and a inspiration to his older self.  The film's set-up is nothing if not formulaic -- in fact, the plot is inspired, it seems, by Bruce Willis' role in Die Hard:  a middle-aged man is estranged from his ex-wife and daughter and has to earn their respect in a fiery and violent ordeal at the climax of the movie.  This is stupid, retrograde stuff and tolerable only because for most of its length the movie refuses to take these narrative cliches seriously.  

Cage's daughter Addy is disgusted with him because he keeps imposing his rather outre taste in film on her -- he loves a hundred-year old picture that his daughter calls The Cabinet of Dr. Calamari (presumably for its exaggerated expressionist acting); the picture bores the 16-year old girl to tears.  At her birthday party, Cage gets drunk, sings an improvised bit of doggerel dedicated to her, and embarrasses his daughter.  Cage has just been turned-down for a role in which he thought he could make a come-back (not that he's ever been gone), is living at the Sunset Tower where he owes $600,000, and feels that he's washed-up.  His agent, Fink (played by Neil Patrick Harris) sets him up with a gig at Mallorca, an appearance at birthday party for which he's supposed to be paid a million dollars.  As it happens, the Spanish olive oil prince seems to be a gangster, the leader of an international cartel of arm's smugglers.  When Cage turns up in Mallorca, two CIA agents recruit him to infiltrate the criminal organization and provide intelligence to the U.S. government.  Cage is skeptical at first, but enjoys the fact that he's doing something of real significance.  He gains the trust of the criminal, a man who is a fanatic about Cage's acting, and the two of them collaborate on a script.  The script is supposed to be "a beautiful character-driven movie for adults" described by Cage to the enthusiastic gangster as "Cassavetes meets Inarritu with a touch of Von Trier."  This part of the film is meandering, nicely eccentric, and, in fact, a nice character-driven picture for adults.  But Cage's CIA handlers need him to remain in the gangster's compound long enough to solve a kidnapping -- the daughter of the Catalonian president has been kidnapped by the gangster.  So, Cage is led to tell the gangster that the movie needs more box-office oomph, that is, some car chases and gun fights, and, therefore, they should introduce a kidnapping plot into the pictures.  (Obviously, the movie under consideration is the film that we are watching.)  The gangster, hoping to help Cage artistically, flies his ex-wife and daughter to Mallorca, ostensibly so that family issues troubling the actor can be resolved.  But the ex-wife and Addy, the 16-year-old daughter, are kidnapped by the bad guys and this leads to a standard action-film climax with lots of car chases through the narrow roads on the Mallorcan coast as well as gun-battles, explosions, and the like.  None of this is particularly interesting and the action sequences are staged in a perfunctory manner.  The CIA orders Cage to kill the gangster who has now become his best friend; the gangster also decides that he has to murder cage.  There's an unsatisfying plot twist that resolves this conundrum and, as we used to say in the seventies, represents a "cop-out" from the "adult" problem of mixed loyalties posed by the narrative.  The movie ends happily with Cage and ex-wife along with Addie, reconciled, the movie made with the gangster a great popular success, and the three principals blissfully watching the gangster's favorite movie, Paddington 2.  

In the first two-thirds of the moviem there are many laugh-out-loud sequences.  Cage and the gangster drop acid and drive maniacally along the sea-coast.  They become paranoid and are stymied by an ancient wall that you can easily walk around but which they desperately try to scale.  Cage gets to over-act in various ways, including a slapstick sequence where he is half-paralyzed by some kind of drug intended for the bad guys.  There are many funny and smart lines, for instance, Cage praising his performance style as "nouveau shamanic acting."  The script on which he is working with the Spanish gangster is described as "involving dueling Christ figures."  All of this is very amusing until the action plot kicks in and wrecks the movie.  In the action sequences, the film seems to forget that Cage is just a Hollywood actor whose exploits on-screen are fictional and supported, as he says at one point, by "the stunt department."  This is unfortunate but the picture is clever enough and sufficiently witty to support a recommendation and the stuff that doesn't work, at the end of the picture, is jarring but not so bad as to annul the mild pleasures offered by the first, and best, part of the film.  (Mallorca is represented by the coast of Croatia and most of the movie seems to have been shot in Hungary.)