I'm not much of a Nicholas Cage fan. I mean, I respect his work as an actor and I've enjoyed a lot of his films, especially "Raising Arizona." However, I'm not a Nicholas Cage in the modern sense, meaning the Nicholas Cage who has become a pop culture icon for his over-the-top, intense performances in ever-more-ludicrous action films. I preferred "Pig" to "Prisoners of the Ghostland." And "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent" is really all about this version of Nicholas Cage, the larger-than-life persona who the filmmakers have decided to build a meta action film around.
There have been perfectly decent meta films like this before, such as the Jean-Claude Van Damme dark comedy "JCVD." "Unbearable Weight" follows the same template, portraying Cage as an actor going through a rough patch professionally and personally. He's given a fictional family, an ex-wife, Olivia (Sharon Horgan), and a teen daughter, Addy (Lily Sheen), he's trying to do right by. We watch him lose a coveted role and make plans for his retirement from acting. Then he accepts a $1 million offer from a Spanish businessman, Javi (Pedro Pascal), to make an appearance at his birthday party. Then the CIA gets involved, and a pair of agents (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz) recruit him into their investigation of Javi as an arms dealer and the likely kidnapper of a politician's daughter, Maria (Katrin Vankova).
Javi turns out to be an aspiring screenwriter, and he and Cage spend most of the movie bantering about movies and screenwriting. There's a lot of Nicholas Cage hero worship and a lot of rather wholesome male bonding before the movie turns into the high-octane action movie that we know it's destined to be. However, "Unbearable Weight" only had a budget of $30 million, not enough to pay for the amount of mayhem that Cage fans might expect. Watching Pascal and Cage pal around in Majorca is fun, but I think the film is only really going to resonate with other Nicholas Cage fans who will get all the jokes and references to films like "Mandy," "The Rock," and "Face/Off." I've heard some claims that every Nicholas Cage movie is referenced here somewhere, and I wouldn't doubt that. However, references alone do not a movie make.
Frankly, there's a lot of the film's construction that doesn't really work. The family troubles are trite and boring. The artistic crisis isn't remotely convincing. The fictionalized Nicholas Cage is simply not as interesting as the real life version, as a cursory glance through his Wikipedia page reveals all sorts of fun fodder for a future biopic that I sincerely hope gets made someday. There's a running gag with Cage arguing with a younger, more ideal version of himself from the "Con Air" era, that reminded me an awful lot of Cage's work as Charlie and Donald Kaufman from "Adaptation." However, "Adaptation" did meta commentary on screenwriting so much better than "Unbearable Weight," it makes this movie's shortcomings all the more obvious. I mean, the Cage double was probably one of the more expensive effects in the movie, and the movie doesn't even bother to pay off the gag.
I feel like I'm being ungenerous towards a film that does mostly succeed in being entertaining. It has some clever one-liners and good performances. Pedro Pascal is at his genial best, and Nicholas Cage is clearly putting in some effort to give his fans what they want. As a movie nerd, I can't help loving the invocations of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Paddington 2." This is also an original script and premise, and there can never be too many of those around. I guess I'm just frustrated that "Unbearable Weight" isn't a better version of the movie that it is, that it plays it safe and isn't remotely as funny as it could be. I can't help wondering what the Lonely Island guys or David Gordon Green could have done with this premise - and David Gordon Green has a cameo in this movie!
Nicholas Cage, wherever you are, I've loved your work for years. Clearly, the filmmakers behind this film did too, which is the best thing I can say about it. But it's not enough.
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