"THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT" (2022)

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Directed by Tom Gormican

Written by Tom Gormican, Kevin Etten

Starring Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Tiffany Haddish

Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes

Rated R for language throughout, some sexual references, drug use, and violence.

In theaters April 22

By “Doc” Hunter Bush, Podcast Czar

The world was not ready for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. The film suffers and we are all the worse for it. The movie is being sold on the memetic Nicolas Cage; the legacy of Cage. The mercurial wildman, the Tasmanian devil of thespian swagger who when presented with a list of ways to actualize a performance, will create an entirely new approach. The “Not the bees!” Cage; the Cage who lists every letter of the alphabet to chastise a subordinate in Vampire’s Kiss; the scream-crying, drinking whiskey in his tighty whities Cage. That is the Cage that UWMT is trading on.

There’s nothing wrong with that Cage. He’s damn entertaining. He’s the embodiment of unpredictability; acting as 4 dimensional chess - predicting expectations and obliterating them. The phrase “He zigged when I thought he would zag” does not apply to this Cage. This Cage doesn’t do either. For lack of a better word, he zangs. He does something you didn’t even imagine possible.

The Cage presented in UWMT isn’t that Cage. He’s closer (probably) to the actual Cage: an enthusiast for, and artisan in his chosen profession who now has to navigate personal relationships and professional hurdles in a world he finds himself unprepared for. If that description sounds pretentious, it is, but that doesn’t make it less apt. Half of this movie, the better half easily, dances around being a hangout film between Cage (playing a semi-fictionalized version of himself) and Pedro Pascal (playing Javi, a billionaire super fan) as they drink, discuss cinema, and leap into the ocean. This kernel of an idea, a story about Cage finding someone on his wavelength, someone to whom he can really relate, is the movie I was hoping to see.

I try to approach each film on its own merits. With some films, that’s the only way you can view them. To that end, it’s unfair of me to engage in armchair quarterbacking. Always saying what a film “should have been” is a weakness as a filmgoer and anyway is purely speculation because I had no hand in it; only the creators can really say whether the film we’re getting is what they intended. But sometimes the film itself tells you.

About ⅓ of the way through UWMT, after the bromance between Cage & Javi has blossomed, they’ve decided to write a screenplay together which will star Cage. Admittedly, a bunch of this is in-world wheel-spinning to buy Cage time to snoop around, but put a pin in that and we’ll come back to it in a moment. Javi & Cage are hyping each other up on their screenplay as something character and performance driven, an adult drama for people who appreciate the craft of filmmaking. But, as Cage tells Javi, they need a hook. Something to bring people into theaters, because unless you’re a major studio franchise you don’t have a guaranteed audience and no one is going to go see the kind of movie they want to make.

To that end, in UWMT Cage is conscripted into working for the CIA (agents played by Tiffany Hadish and Ike Barinholtz) who believe Javi is the head of an international cartel responsible for kidnapping a rival’s daughter and holding her for ransom. So when, at Haddish’s prompting, Cage pitches Javi on adding a kidnapping angle to their otherwise stately character piece screenplay, everything he says about putting butts in seats sounds like screenwriters Tom Gormican (who also directed) and Kevin Etten lampshading the inclusion of a trite action-thriller premise into their story. That’s what I meant when I said the world wasn’t ready for this film. In another world, another time, with the film business in a different state, maybe The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent could have been more its own beast and not needed to court wider audiences with a fairly rote kidnapping plot.

Still while the balance of these two halves is handled fairly well for the duration of the film, the third act shifts the focus more squarely onto action/comedy and that’s where the film stumbled most for me. None of the action is bad, it’s just unremarkable. The problem is, throughout the film leading up to it, the characters are constantly invoking (and footage is occasionally shown from) some of Cage’s illustrious career, so when you keep bringing up Face/Off, or The Rock, or Con Air for an hour, your action scenarios are going to pale in comparison. That’s not a dig by any means. These are films made by (mostly great) directors at their peak, in the era of the over-the-top action blockbuster. Few could hope to come close.

The smart choice then would be to lean into anything that sets your film apart from those, namely the comedy and the meta-awareness of Nicolas (“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-woo!”) Cage. There are attempts at both things but they just slightly miss the mark. A prime action comedy scene involving Cage & Javi attempting to escape over a wall blows the big punchline by showing that the wall isn’t really that large halfway through the gag, then just going back to it without adding or changing anything, making the true punchline feel like a footnote. A trivial complaint, to be sure, but one that stuck out to me. A bungled opportunity.

Mostly though what we do get is fine. A perfectly serviceable, decently self-aware action/comedy starring a true original. It could definitely use more Cage-ness. For example Cage name-checks his “nouveau shamanic” acting method, which I’m reasonably familiar with, but would have loved to hear Cage (even a semi-fictionalized version of him) wax poetic about, at length. There’s also a whole aspect of the plot involving Cage’s relationship with his (fictional) ex-wife and (fictional) daughter (played by Sharon Horgan and Lily Mo Sheen respectively) that works extremely well to help drive things early on but becomes just another by-the-numbers action/thriller component by the end of the film. Even knowing that these relationships are made up, I would rather have mined them for comedic set-ups than just fold them into an unrelated action scenario.

Would I have preferred this film be something else, something befitting the originality of the star whose name it’s trading on? Absolutely. A two-person hangout film perhaps, something like Sideways but about acting rather than wine (there would still be plenty of wine) highlighting the easy camaraderie between the enigmatic Cage and the infinitely lovable Pedro Pascal? Yes. Pascal carries his fair share of the movie, not due to anyone slacking, but because he has to play against this version of Cage’s Cage and between them they have to maintain a very specific tone that allows for you to believe that a real actor in ostensibly our real world could and would be put into the scenario presented; that the CIA would think that a famously volatile personality is their best bet for a dangerous, high-pressure recon mission. When events run the risk of getting too obviously parodic, Pascal is there to ground things, but when it’s time to get silly, Pascal can hold his own. 

Maybe it could have been a sort of Slumdog Millionaire action comedy where Cage continuously draws on moments and lessons learned from his expansive career? Certainly. Cage drawing on experiences from his career during the action, with asides like “I learned this car trick filming Gone in 60 Seconds” or “The bee wrangler on The Wicker Man taught me this” would have gone over like gangbusters during the final act because the film had laid so much tonal track already.

The moments in which we get flashes of these things still work and it’s a genuinely enjoyable experience watching Cage addressing his legacy, even from this slight remove, while in a noted career resurgence. I had hoped that this would be another idiosyncratic character piece for Cage, something that would fit nicely alongside Mandy or Pig, albeit one with a slightly silly, gonzo meta element to it and while this isn’t that, it’s a fine addition to Cage’s ever-expanding, always unpredictable oeuvre.