The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Some time ago, I wrote a bunch about Nic Cage in a review of Pig. Pig is a near perfect movie that uses Cage’s considerable talents to craft an astonishing drama.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is not that, and it shouldn’t be judged by that standard. It amused me though. And I certainly enjoyed how much of the conclusions that I had about Cage were similar to the points that Director Tom Gormican and writer Kevin Etten make here.

Maybe the guy just likes to keep working you know? 

Anyway, Massive Talent is a fun comedy that plays with Cage’s persona but doesn’t tax his acting abilities to any great degree. 

Cage gets to play both a normal version of himself and the Pure Id version of Nic Cage that he often displays in classics like The Rock, Gone in 60 Seconds and Ghost Rider. 

The flick makes a few moves toward the version of Nic Cage who can nail down a serious drama. However, in this movie, the Nic Cage of Leaving Las Vegas, Pig and (I assume) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, is a feint, a shadow, and set up for another joke.

Which is probably as it should be. 

The movie is a blast and Cage gets to have fun, playing two versions of Nic Cage, neither of which the actual Cage (Nicolas Coppola) really wants you to think is real. 

The granddaddy of this particular kind of meta work is Being John Malkovich. Written by Charlie Kaufman. Cage would play Kaufman, and his imaginary brother, struggling to write a screenplay for The Orchid Thief, in Adaptation. 

Which is to say that in a filmography that spans more than 100 movies sometimes when you watch a Nic Cage flick you can feel like you have been here before. 

I’m pretty sure he made some version of Drive Angry like 5 times. 

However, this thing made me cackle a bunch. It shouldn’t work but Cage and Pedro Pascal sell it with charm and enthusiasm. You are likely to see the twists coming but everything is handled with such joy that you won’t be disappointed.

It played with my expectations in a fun way but it also clearly did not want to do anything to tarnish the legacy of the man who has been the beating heart of movies as good as Raising Arizona, as wild as Face/Off and as ridiculously bad as Left Behind. 

Morgan Freeman says he was once told, as he was getting ever more famous, that he would be asked to play God. He ended up with the role in Bruce Almighty. 

In the same way it was inevitable that sooner or later Nicolas Coppola would be asked to play Nic Cage.

We are quite lucky that he plays “Nick Cage” in a movie as good as this one.