The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

* * * M 2022 Action/Comedy - 1h 46m

In this action-packed comedy, Nicolas Cage plays Nick Cage, channeling his iconic characters as he's caught between a superfan (Pedro Pascal) and a CIA agent (Tiffany Haddish).

Nicolas Cage stars as... Nick Cage in the action-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

Creatively unfulfilled and facing financial ruin, the fictionalized version of Cage must accept a $1 million offer to attend the birthday of a dangerous superfan (Pedro Pascal). Things take a wildly unexpected turn when Cage is recruited by a CIA operative (Tiffany Haddish) 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.

With a career built for this very moment, the seminal award-winning actor must take on the role of a lifetime: Nick Cage.

Release date: 22 April 2022 (Australia)

Rating: R (Violence|Drug Use|Some Sexual References|Language Throughout)
Genre: Comedy, Action
Runtime: 1h 46m

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89% TOMATOMETER
89% AUDIENCE SCORE

Smart, funny, and wildly creative, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent presents Nicolas Cage in peak gonzo form -- and he's matched by Pedro Pascal's scene-stealing performance.

Melbourne

Nicolas Cage has been accused of many things as an actor, but rarely of not trying hard enough. If anything, he tends to be faulted for the opposite: total commitment whether this is warranted or not.

Tom Gormican's entertaining if slight buddy comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent offers Cage the chance to prove that he doesn't take himself too seriously after all - a task he naturally approaches with all the reckless sincerity he can muster.

Forty years into a career that began when he was in his teens, Cage is currently enjoying the latest of many comebacks, but things aren't going so well for the fictionalised version of himself he plays here.

Not that this " Nick Cage' ' has lost his zest for performing. On the contrary, he's the kind of guy who needs little encouragement to bust out an intense dramatic monologue in the middle of the street, which might be part of the problem. His obsessive focus on his career is also affecting his personal life, especially his relationship with his teenage daughter Addy (Lily Sheen), who like most of the supporting characters has no direct counterpart in the real world.

At a low ebb, Nick agrees to fly to Majorca and appear as a paid special guest at a birthday party thrown by Javi (Pedro Pascal), a Spanish billionaire said to be his biggest fan. Where Nick is volatile, Javi is all laid-back good humour, at least on the surface. Nonetheless, they hit it off, and soon they're making plans to work on a script together, even as Nick is warned by the CIA (represented by Ike Barinholtz and Tiffany Haddish) that his new best mate could have a sinister side.

Above and beyond the metafictional games, this traditional comic pairing proves to be the film's main attraction - and for all Cage's showboating, Pascal for quite a while looks set to take over as the real star.

Sadly, Gormican doesn't have quite the nerve to go all the way with this bait-andswitch approach. Another letdown is that he doesn't do more with the women in the cast - though this isn't entirely surprising, given that his one previous credit as writer-director is the Zac Efron bromance That Awkward Moment.

Cage himself has swum in these waters before, notably as the star of Spike Jonze's 2002 satire Adaptation, in which he played the film's actual screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, as well as Kaufman's imaginary twin brother.

Adaptation isn't among the films in Cage's back catalogue cited explicitly here, and it's understandable that Gormican might not want the comparison to the forefront of our minds.

On the other hand, it could be said that the only way to go Charlie Kaufman is to go full Charlie Kaufman - and showing Cage and his new collaborator striving desperately to match Adaptation's ingenuity would undoubtedly be a much more Charlie Kaufman thing to do.

Reviewed by JAKE WILSON | 24 April 2022 The Age Digital Edition. To subscribe, visit "https://www.theage.com.au".