'The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent' movie review: The greatest Nicolas Cage extravaganza

This movie is what you get when you put together Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal into a movie featuring the actor Nicolas Cage, with a side of absurd Nicolas Cage for good measure

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Age Rating: A

Directed by: Tom Gormican

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Neil Patrick Harris

Rating: 4/5

Nicolas Cage movies have always been sort of 'out there,' in the sense that almost every single one of them is simultaneously worthy of cult film status, they all have their charm (yes, even Ghost Rider), and most of all, they're generally all entertaining.

What The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent does is funnel several of them - largely those which could feasibly be compiled into a "undisputed Nic Cage greatest hits" list - into an action/comedy romp centred around Nic Cage, starring Nic Cage, as Nic Cage - doing Nic Cage things.

As an actor, Nicolas Cage is something of an enigma. His films have featured so many story elements that they can hardly be put together - military conspiracy, criminal conspiracy, occult conspiracy...the list, erm, goes on. But that's not the point, though Massive Talent's plot also features a conspiracy. The film features Nicolas Cage playing a version of himself, tormented between his love for acting, his more successful younger self, and his increasingly estranged family.

The first few minutes of the film feature what ultimately proves to be the driving conspiracy of the story - a high-profile kindapping, into which Cage is unwittingly pulled during a surprisingly heartfelt sojourn at the house of Javi Gutierrez, featuring Paddington 2, and the movie just sort of rolls with the increasingly weird things Nicolas Cage drives it into doing, sometimes literally.

The core of the film are Nicolas Cage and Javi, and their relationship from acquaintances to bosom buddies. For all intents and purposes, Pedro Pascal seems to play a stand-in for Cage's fanbase, taken to the logical extreme in that he has a literal cave full of Nicolas Cage memerobilia, and with an extensive knowledge of his movies, which are referred to and called out no less than 20 times, both directly and through a lot of plot-contrived, acid-fuelled nonsense that the two go through, sharing what is likely one of the best on-screen chemistries as the two literally build their performances off of each other, leading to a crescendo unlike any other Nicolas Cage movie.

But the film kind of takes a small dip when the afforementioned conspiracy rears its ugly head - a little thing called out earlier in the movie by Javi as the two discuss their own film, which, shockingly looks a lot in structure as Massive Talent when seen from the outside - which makes you wonder, is this really a movie or a rampant fever dream given physical form? Either way, the writers deserve a lot of credit for the numerous instances of (non)subtlety, and Tom Gormican deserves a lot of credit for bringing out the writing into a hugely colourful form.

The film is what you get when you let Nicolas Cage be Nicolas Cage - outrageous, larger-than-self and patently absurd, but just like Nicolas Cage the actor, Massive Talent has an endearing side to balance out the laughs and the action (no, Paddington 2 does not get all the credit for that). It's a true class piece in character acting.