The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent (2021) It's been a long time since we came across a movie that dared such a high wire act as this one.......
By now, everyone knows this is an ultra-meta comedy in which Nicolas Cage simultaneously lampoons and celebrates his legendary status as cinema's most tireless, prolific and ridiculed overactor.
Cage may be in on the joke, but you can tell throughout this rambunctious action-comedy that his compulsion to perform is deeply ingrained, heartfelt and sincere. We all somehow know that he doesn't just make these all those bizarre straight-to-video junkers to help him crawl out from under his mounting debts.
We sense he's also doing it for the sheer love of acting, and also for satiating the self-absorbed narcissism that's become so much a part of his public persona.
And that's where we find Nicolas Cage at the start of this film, playing a Nicolas Cage whose constant urge to work and over-the-top actor's ego has wrecked his marriage, his relationship with his teen daughter......and his career.
Unable to land his client a fresh film role, Cage's wheeling-dealing agent (Neil Patrick Harris) send him flying off to a shady kingpin's sumptuous mansion in sunny Spain. Cage's gig: to entertain this long time superfan Javi Gutierrez (Pedtro Pascal) a notorious gun-dealer who may have kidnapped a prominent politician's daughter.
Cage is quickly recruited by two CIA agents ( Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz) to search his host's villa to find the missing girl......but he's mostly busy bonding with the hyper Javi, whose adoration of all things Cage includes a shrine museum. While mutually tripping on LSD, they begin to craft a screenplay together.. Big surprise.....it's all about them.
Though the movie begins off the rails, in its third act it settles down to become a satirical knockoff of the kind of mid-level budgeted action thrillers that Cage use to regularly pump out all through the 1990's......which naturally requires a rousing car chase and assorted gun battles.
As clever as that sounds, the action stuff seems to signal that the film's run out of ideas....until the filmmakers manage to wrap it up with a suitable meta ending that both revels in and slyly skewers the feel-good finishes of typical Hollywood product.
We can think of few actors other than Cage (and maybe Christopher Walken) who could anchor a film quite like this one ........a mock biography of a performer who functions as an artist seriously committed to his craft and also as a clownish, over-the-top loon, which makes him all the more cherished.
And maybe this movie isn't always successful at keeping all the balls in the air that it tries to juggle all the way through.......but it still makes for a funny, one of a kind 4 star (****) trip through that crazy theme park known as Cage-Land. Take a tour real soon.
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