The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)

8/10

Starring

Nicolas Cage

Pedro Pascal

Sharon Horgan

 

Directed by Tom Gormican

 

As a young child growing up, Nicolas Cage was a huge part of cinema for me. His movies like The Rock, Face/Off, and Con Air were steady diets. He also did great movies after those, but those three always come to mind when I think of him. I saw them regularly and never got tired of them. After the National Treasure two-parter, nothing else has made me think of Nicolas Cage.

When I heard about this movie being good, I was skeptical. I recall critics having the same thing to say about Pig, a movie Cage made that was just awful. This movie, on the other hand, is one of the best I’ve seen this year (if not the best), and I can’t remember laughing this hard this year. This movie is a comedy-crime film that just blows me away with the way the plot was written. Then the chemistry between Cage and Pedro Pascal is magical to behold.

When a movie is smart and funny, there is no better feeling than just relaxing and allowing the story to take you away. The creative style of the writer/director, Tom Gormican, of taking the character Cage in a fictional version of himself—not as lost as movies like this often make their characters—is something I appreciate. When most comedy movies make fictional versions of their characters lost and oblivious to life, this movie makes Cage seem like a man struggling to find his glory days and having a hard time being a father, making him normal.

The plot starts with Cage going to meet a screenwriter for a part. He had read the script and believed starring in this movie would be his big break, a return to the limelight. It ended up not going well because, in his bid to show how ready he was for the role, he spooked the writer. In a financial mess, as we know Cage is, he took a $1 million gig. The gig was to be a guest of honor at billionaire Javi’s (Pascal) place in Majorca for his birthday. It turns out that Javi had other plans—he was working on a script, and Cage was his idol. He wanted Cage to read it and star in it.

On the other side of things, at the beginning of the film, we witness a young girl being kidnapped while watching Con Air (a film by Cage). The CIA thinks there is something about this kidnapping that has to do with Javi, and when they find out that Cage was to be at Javi’s place, they want him to spy for them.

The movie places all these cards before you, and we watch as Cage tries to navigate his present life as a washed-up actor, Javi struggles to get Cage to take his script seriously as Cage’s future big break, and the CIA tries to get the kidnapped girl free.

I loved this movie, and it’s sad to see that it wasn’t a box-office success. The problem is that Cage has lost the power to draw people to the cinemas, but if only they tried, they would have seen one of the most amazing films of 2022.