Nicolas Cage is fed up. After having carved out a unique reputation over the decades for its deliberately outrageous but always captivating playing, the star has just decided to retire. We do not want him for the roles that interest him, and those offered to him bore him. And then, in recent years, as his agent reproaches him, he has turned too many turnips in the chain. However, if he can put his career on hold, Cage cannot on the other hand make his debts disappear. So here he is forced to accept, for a million dollars, to spend the weekend with a rich Spanish admirer, who turns out to be a big trafficker.
In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (A talent in solid gold), Nicolas Cage takes the proven avenue of self-mockery and has fun – kindly – at his expense. Too bad the movie isn’t as game as its star.
Oscar winner for best actor in 1996 for his brilliant composition as a suicidal alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas (Farewell Las Vegas), Nicolas Cage subsequently experienced professional ups and downs. First with constancy, he alternated successes of studios such Con Air (Air convicts) and National Treasure (National Treasure), with more thought-provoking movies like The Weather Man (Mister Weather) or Adaptation (another “meta” film, brilliant this one, in which Cage plays a satirical version of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his fictional twin, Donald).
For a good fifteen years, however, Cage has been doing a lot – but not only – anything. The bottom of the barrel seemed to have been reached, when a handful of unusual films allowed him to perform what Hollywood loves most: a comeback. After mandy, Prisoners of the Ghostland and especially Pig (Pig), The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent comes to cement this great “ comeback “, but also to comment on it and make fun of it a bit (“I never left!” Cage keeps objecting, including to his alter ego young, a sort of “ghost of past glory” that came to haunt him).
Potentially fascinating, the exercise would have been more conclusive with a less conventional scenario.
Cage has fun
Because if we remove from the equation the fact that Cage self-parodies, the plot itself, a banal action comedy, turns out to be very ordinary. The ins and outs of this one, which includes the kidnapping of a politician’s daughter, are indeed very easy to unravel.
And that’s not to mention the lazily sketched secondary characters, from the ambiguous but not so much antagonist of Pedro Pascal (false), to the patient ex-wife who is only there to be won back (Sharon Horgan , who deserved better), to this awkwardly integrated CIA agent (Tiffany Haddish, same thing).
But, hey, there’s Cage, and he’s obviously having fun. Moreover, in a typically frank interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the cult actor specifies that at the base, the film was more out of the ordinary:
“It was a sequence where the character of Nick Cage goes into a series of vignettes that are all stylized in the manner of German Expressionism and Doctor Caligari’s office [film fétiche du protagoniste]. So there was a black and white sequence that was a chase Gone in 60 Seconds [Partis en 60 secondes] in a Mustang, there was the character of Leaving Las Vegas in a hotel room… It was fun to shoot and cool to watch […] In the end, the studio decided it was too busted for the public. »
It will be objected that the public would have been quite capable of appreciating a more risky proposition. Said studio also seems to have forgotten that the film’s raison d’etre, Nicolas Cage, is anything but a “cautious” actor.