Monday, June 20, 2022

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

 In the catalogue of movies starring actors playing a lightly fictionalized of themselves, Nick Cage's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent would come in slightly below JCVD and miles and miles above Pauly Shore is Dead.
 (I'd love to have more movies to include in that list, but I couldn't think of any others... There's tons of movies where actors play a slightly fictionalized version of themselves as minor characters - There's Being John Malkovich, Last Action Hero, The Player - but none of them are built around the actors-as-characters.)

 After failing to get a role he had his heart set on, beset with money and family problems, Nicholas Cage (Nicholas Cage) decides to take on a paid gig to spend a couple of days at a rich fan's birthday party in Majorca. It's exactly as cringeworthy as it sounds, except that the millionaire (Pedro Pascal) turns out to be a pretty cool guy, and they rapidly become friends.
 And if you've seen the (terrible) trailer, then you know what's next: the millionaire is apparently the head of a Spanish drug cartel (this is actually a thing that exists, and the film accurately ties it down to Galicia, the area where most of them are based!) so a CIA agent (Tiffany Haddish, who gets a couple of good jokes in) gets Nick to spy on his new found buddy. What follows is a pretty mellow, charming comedy with two very charismatic actors having some misadventures: a very funny acid freakout, some low-budget shoot outs and chases (a respectable effort for a low budget action comedy.) Maybe, just maybe, by the end Nick Cage will learn how to be a better human being, parent, and ex-husband.


 The Nicholas Cage persona is used reasonably well, scoring some big laughs with ridiculously pompous statements that... yeah, I can totally buy him saying. There's some post-modern riffing, but don't expect a deconstruction of Nick Cage's career, or any degree of reflection on his real-world off-screen antics. His movie daughter isn't called Kara. This is light, Cage-friendly entertainment, and what little mind-fuckery there is never intends to even begin approaching Charlie Kaufman levels.

 What does drag the movie down a little, besides some pacing problems in the early going, is how patently fake a lot of the showbiz talk seems to be. The dialog in the fake movie Nick is trying to get into (to be directed by David Gordon Green!) is so purple I can't see it flying in a 30s pulp novel, much less anything produced this century. When talking about respectable character actor roles, someone puts forth "the gay uncle in a Duplass movie" as an example, someone else says that a script is a mix between three lesser-known or niche directors that don't make any sense in context, that sort of thing. Dunno, it all sounded extremely inauthentic to me. That also was a problem in JCVD, mind.

 That, and they cast Neil Patrick Harris but they just had him play an agent instead of letting him reprise his role as Neil Patrick Harris from the Harold and Kumar trilogy. Talk about missed opportunities.
 

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