The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent Review

To quote a Coca-Cola advert, “so many movies, so little time.” And there’s been so many movies made, it seems that there are little storylines that haven’t already been made into (several) movies, so why not make movies about that? Movies about movies are nothing new, given that Last Action Hero was released almost thirty years ago, but it seems we have been getting a lot of them recently, given that it’s the direction Disney are going with their Rescue Rangers reboot. Recently released is also The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a movie starring Nicolas Cage about Nicolas Cage, or rather, about the meme Nic Cage has become.

Here we see a fictionalised version of Nicolas Cage considering quitting acting and worrying about his relationship with his daughter Addy (Lily Sheen) when he is hired to appear at the birthday party of a fan of his, Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal). However, Cage is brought into the plot of an action movie when CIA agents Vivian (Tiffany Hadish) and Martin Etten (Ike Barinholtz) tell him that Javi may have organised the kidnapping of a politician’s daughter and Cage will have to go undercover to find where she’s being kept.

If this sounds like a meta movie, it very much is. When Nicolas and Javi are bonding, one might think of Donnie Brasco, and indeed, that movie gets mentioned not long after. Shades of Adaptation are present, down to Nic Cage playing another character, but incorporated in a more playful way. Javi has a large collection of Nic Cage memorabilia, but since that collection includes the infamous sequin pillow, it feels more like being in on a joke rather than sycophantism. It also helps that Cage and Pascal work well together, making up their own little movie scenes and brainstorming. The whole film could have just been them discussing the type of movie they’d like to make and it still would have been entertaining.

Hardly the best piece of metafiction out there, and it could probably could have done a bit more with its “action movie about an action movie star in an action movie plot” but The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is tremendously enjoyable, and might give you a new appreciation for Paddington 2 as well.