The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

dir: Tom Gormican

2022

This was terrible to watch, just terrible.

It was so disappointing. I long ago gave up trying to figure out how it was that Nicolas Cage could be so great in certain roles, and so terrible in so many others. I realised that Cage himself didn’t know, so what chance did I have to grasp it?

He plays a couple of versions of Nicolas Cage here, and none of them feel remotely believable, though they both have their sources in things Cage has said and done in the past.

The fictionalised “real” Nicolas Cage struggles to get work, and has an agent played by Neil Patrick Harris. Unfortunately (for me), he’s not playing Neil Patrick Harris, or the fictionalised Neil Patrick Harris that guest-starred outlandishly in the Harold and Kumar movies.

No, he’s an agent called Fink, and even he can’t seem to get Cage good roles. Cage even meets with one man movie industry David Gordon Green (playing himself) to try to convince him to give him the lead role in some movie with Boston crims in it, and it’s possibly one of the most painful things I’ve ever seen recorded on film.

I guess the point is, it’s meant to be excruciating. A Cage at the top of his game wouldn’t agree out of desperation to attend the birthday party of some Spanish billionaire (the great Pedro Pascal) who is a super fan of Cage and Cage related media. And yet that is what the script imposes upon him.

Also, to sell how low Cage has fallen, he has an ex-wife (Sharon Horgan) who loathes him, and a daughter (Lily Mo Sheen) who can’t stand him. The script requires that Cage acts like a boorish arsehole to all and sundry, and a drunken fuck-up at that, because none of the set up reflects where Cage actually is at as an actor or as a person / father.

In “real” life he has 6 ex-wives and a bunch of kids, but for our benefit I guess they had to streamline things. He also buys castles, has been arrested for domestic abuse and tries to make as many movies per year as possible. He stars in so many movies per year that I look at the movies he’s made over the last ten years, and recognise only a couple of them.

The Cage we see in this flick is a loser arsehole, but that apparently gives him a character arc, an incentive to improve himself, and makes him more relatable to us, the perplexed Nic Cage fans in the audience, who are also probably losers.

But how they go about it… Cage flies to Spain, and is surveilled by the CIA, who think the billionaire is an arms dealer, and from then on he goes from his “real” life, and is dropped into the shitty plot of a very stupid kind of action movie. When you hear about this, you too may wonder, like I did, “Hasn’t he done this before, like in Adaptation, which mocked the formulaic structures and conventions of screenplay writing and dumb action films by devolving into a dumb action film in the end?”

Well, yes, that happened, and I have no doubt screenwriter / director Tom Gormican remembers it too, since he remembers many of Cage’s movies. But whatever you can say about Tom Gormican, he’s no Spike Jonze or Charlie Kaufman.

He’s not even Donnie Kaufman.

If this flick has almost any redeeming quality, it’s that Pedro Pascal is in it, and is great, because he’s great in everything he’s in, even terrible things. He plays his role totally straight, as in, as someone who has idolised Cage all his life, and really loves his movies. Here he gets the chance to hang out with his idol, and maybe, just maybe, they could become best buddies?

Who knows? Stranger things have happened. Cage has gone broke multiple times from buying too many castles around the world, so he’ll hang out with anyone if the price is right.

And if he’s hanging out with a rich billionaire who bought the guns Castor Troy used in Face / Off, what price is a man’s soul?

Javi (Pascal’s character) of course just wants to hang out with his idol, but he also wants to convince Cage to star in a film that he’s written the screenplay for. Cage immediately turns it down (he thinks if he retires from acting the world will give a shit, or that his daughter will want to spend time with him. Neither is likely to be true), but strings Javi along because…the CIA / the plot requires it.

The fact is, if you look at the list of stuff Cage has done in the last ten years alone, it’s totally obvious that Cage never turns down anything. As long as they agree to give him money up front, and a wig, he is honour-bound because of a gypsy’s curse to perform in anyone’s movie, anywhere.

That’s what they do: they lean out of a van holding a wig, and they trick him into the vehicle, and drive off, and have their wicked cinematic way with him.

It feels cruel saying shit like that, but I watch a lot of movies, and I don’t think I’ve missed anything not seeing Willy’s Wonderland, Prisoners of the Ghostland, Grand Isle, Primal, Kill Chain, The Trust, Pay the Ghost, Running with the Devil, Dog Eat Dog, The Runner, A Score to Settle, Vengeance – I mean, they don’t even sound like real movies. They sound like movies generated by an algorithm programmed to generate fake movie titles in a Hollywood parody.

But those are all movies that Cage starred in that came out in the last 5 years. So let’s not pretend that Cage would turn Javi, or anyone down.

The problem is that, other than the inevitable Cage starring in a movie within a movie where he plays an overamped version of himself, the flick doesn’t really do anything that enjoyable along the way, in fact, it’s mostly cringe-worthy. Cage can be sublime in flicks, but this is definitely not one of them, even when he’s meant to be playing a world-weary version of himself.

It’s not convincing on any level, either on the primary level, or on the action movie level. The action, which I guess we’re meant to think is terrible in a tongue in cheek manner, is just outright bad, like, incompetently bad. People in productions can’t always see how bad it’s going to be in the end, but I have no doubt people saw it early on here.

At times when it felt like he thinks he’s being funny, or profound, I felt like yelling at the screen “you think you’re being cool, but you’re starting to look and sound like Steven Seagal.”

Cage is the worst thing about the film, which is an ironic thing to say about a film where he unconvincingly plays himself. It didn’t need to be a performance close to who he is in real life. Being John Malkovich has a performance in it by John Malkovich, and it’s (probably) nothing like what the actor is actually like. But it still worked amazingly well.

At times when it felt like he thinks he’s being funny, or profound, I felt like yelling at the screen “you think you’re being cool, but you’re starting to look and sound like Steven Seagal.”

This? Fucking hell. Cage grouses to his therapist, that people mock him for doing too many films, when working hard in the past used to be celebrated. It used to be the metric by which men were praised for being hard workers at their blue-collar jobs. But now he is mocked for it.

That’s about the only line in the whole flick that feels like it’s something Cage actually believes. But it’s still so disingenuous. People, audiences, reviewers don’t mock you because you make a lot of movies. They mock you because you make so many bad movies with terrible performances in them, and because you don’t like saying the words on the page, and prefer to make shit up all the time instead, because you know better than the screenwriters and directors.

All the people who praised you in last year’s sublime Pig didn’t criticise you for giving too many great performances – they wondered why this one performance was so much better than the five other films you did that year.

Anyway, I think I’ve lost my mind a bit, thinking that I’m talking directly to him. Just like he goes a bit bonkers talking to an earlier version of himself, being Nicky Cage, who seems like a cocaine abusing version of Nic Cage circa early 90s / Wild at Heart era. Ouch. It’s so painful seeing and hearing that version of Cage. It’s depressing, and slightly terrifying.

There are other actors here, too. I don’t blame them as much. They’re not playing themselves. They’re just playing their roles, following direction, reading their lines, doing what they’re paid to do. They’re doing what they can in order to get further work down the track. None of them want to be branded as “difficult”, or hard to work with. They don’t have the luxury to see themselves as somehow superior to the other people they’re working with.

But none of that applies to Nicolas Fucking Cage, does it.

This is terrible, and not fun. Rarely has a title to a movie been so sorely unjustified.

3 times maybe Cage should have played all the characters in the movie out of 10

--
“Whether you like it or not, you have a gift; and that gift brings light and joy to an increasingly... dark and broken world! And to turn your back on that gift is to turn your back on the... entire human race!” - The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent