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 Conair 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 sceptical. 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 have seen this year (if not the best) and I cannot 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 you get when you just relax and allow the story to just take you away. The creative style of the writer/director Tom Gormican of taking the character, Cage in a fictional version of himself to not be as lost as movies like this do is something I appreciate. When most comedy movies make fictional versions of their characters lost and oblivious of what life is, this movie makes Cage seem like a man struggling to just 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 will 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 honour at a billionaire Javi (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 and he wanted Cage to read and star it.

On the other side of things in the beginning of the film we witness a young girl being kidnapped as she was watching Conair (a film by Cage). The CIA think there is something about this kidnapping that has to do with Javi and when they found out that Cage was to be at Javi’s place, they wanted 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 washup actor. Javi struggling to get Cage to be serious to take his script as Cage’s future big break and the CIA wanting to get the kidnapped girl free.

I loved this movie, and it is sad to see that it was not 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.