The new Nicholas Cage movie “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” was released to theaters on April 22, 2022. This week however, the movie has been released onto the streaming platform Amazon Video. I remember watching the trailer and my first thoughts was: “Is Nick Cage in a movie about himself?” For the most part, yes. In a strange and somewhat entertaining way, “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” at first felt like it was going to be a movie about Cage’s failing movie career, but the movie took a different approach as it began to comment more on how Hollywood treats its aging actors.
The movie follows the aforementioned Cage’s appearance at the birthday party of a rich man played by Pedro Pascal. Pascal’s character is obsessed with Cage and wants him to star in a movie that he wrote. Cage eventually gets sought out by the CIA after learning that Pascal has connections to the drug cartel in Spain. It’s an obscure plot, but it’s Nicholas Cage, and he’s got range. It works for him, and it seems that nowadays a film that he produces is the only one that he gets a role in. Although Cage’s popularity and love is still strong among his fans, a movie about his lack of relevance in the film industry is comical.
The action comedy filters a few pity laughs here and there. Halfway through the film, Cage and Pascal’s characters talk about writing a movie about their friendship that would involve some action and a kidnapping, which had already happened up to that point in the movie. That was when I turned to my friends and we all looked at each other, and we knew that the movie the characters were going to make was the movie we were watching now. Much like the scene in “Spaceballs” where Dark Helmet is watching the movie to find where the protagonists are, the movie broke an equal amount of walls. So many walls were broken that the house was no longer standing.
One of the best scenes, similar to that of the Quaalude scene in “The Wolf of Wall Street” where Leonardo DiCaprio is crawling on the floor because he can’t feel his legs, Cage accidentally gets drugged and begins crawling around on the floor. He passes out, but as any good actor would do, he snaps right back into character, waking up from his coma when the word “action” is said. It’s scenes like these that show the great leaps the film took to try to show some relevance in the film industry.
“The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” overall felt like a fanfiction about Cage that Cage had sent himself in the mail and thought would be a great movie to produce and that fan fiction was written by Pascal. Scenes of Cage watching his own movies in the movie about him only heighten the ego trip that was “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.” The film is worth the watch, but maybe not for a second time.
