The new action-comedy biographical hybrid demeans actor and audience alike.
Some movies are said to be happy accidents — Casablanca is the most famous example — but the new action-adventure farce The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a freak accident. Director Tom Gormican convinced actor Nicolas Cage to satirize his own “legend” in a highly self-conscious parody of all the lousy movies that litter a workaholic actor’s résumé.
The freaky part is that Gormican’s exploitation of Cage, as crude, insulting, and unsavvy as it is, demonstrates good intention. That Cage is in on the joke of playing himself — as a self-obsessed actor so desperate to work he’ll do almost any dangerous, humiliating thing — doesn’t negate the fact that this idea of movie fun ultimately demeans all of us.
Gormican borrows his title from the Milan Kundera novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (or maybe from Philip Kaufman’s kitschy-sexy 1988 film version), which is about confused Czech citizens during the 1960s Soviet invasion who were reluctant to realize their lack of spiritual commitment. By political accident, that same dilemma now affecting the current Eastern European war and our own nation is ignored by Gormican, in his outright extreme fanboyism. He uses the joke of Cage’s career to congratulate filmgoers’ escapism — and fake-news reviewers are raring to go along with it.
The film’s good-time, freak-accident plot — Cage accepts an offer from billionaire Spanish superfan Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal), whom the CIA suspects is a drug kingpin — further ensnares audiences in Hollywood’s regime. It encourages the millennium’s moral distractions. For any thinking person, this apolitical metaverse movie really isn’t apolitical at all.
Consider Gormican’s shrine to Cage (a self-referential version of the shine that Javi has built) as an illustration of the way mass-media entertainment can keep audiences in a mindless state. Gormican blurs any distinction between Cage’s work as an artist interpreting the human condition and a film-industry whore. This burlesque of rotten movies and overwrought acting excuses bad choices and lack of control through the dubious notion that audiences are superior to it all. But not when Gormican’s string of chase-movie stunts and buddy-buddy bonding is as shameless as the low points of Cage’s actual filmography — or when the film turns Tarantino-esque (QT has a lot to answer for).
We’re hit with shamelessness right off when Cage is shown auditioning for David Gordon Green, the once-promising director of George Washington who has himself found the Cage secret of nonstop, unscrupulous Hollywood hackdom. Gormican doesn’t quite achieve the particular low-brow authenticity of Green’s Your Highness or The Foot-Fist Way, which derived from honest bad taste and a defense of trash culture. Instead, Gormican approaches the Nic Cage icon with zero discrimination.
The film’s ultimate parody occurs when the actor recalls a comically de-aged version of himself named Nick (with a K), as ridiculously blond as when Cage disastrously tried playing a Midwestern WASP in Peggy Sue Got Married. Gormican and co-writer Kevin Etten don’t account for filmgoers’ ironic awareness that actors can prostitute themselves and occasionally redeem lousy assignments with exemplary work. That happened for Cage when dreck such as Con Air, Face/Off, Guarding Tess, Leaving Las Vegas, City of Angels, and Kick-Ass was offset by such impressive films as World Trade Center, Snake Eyes, Bringing Out the Dead, Mom and Dad, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. These latter movies don’t fall into the category of Cage camp; many were dismissed by reviewers who objected to their powerful moral inquiry and political daring. These films are the Nicolas Cage legacy that most needs reviving.
Gormican’s goofy, indiscriminate Rotten Tomatoes perspective renders Cage’s career as a hodgepodge. When this film becomes just another example of Hollywood drivel — the late-career version of an actor trying to establish himself — the mirror-image car chases and shoot-outs don’t allow for audience discernment. The movie is geared to celebrity worshippers who are incapable of perceiving the complexity and ambivalence of Cage’s failed artistic efforts (Wild at Heart, Birdy, Adaptation, Vampire’s Kiss, and Matchstick Men).
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a collision of generic formula, celebrity gossip, and the amnesia that results from popular culture’s decline. Gormican would keep us ignorant about how Hollywood works and, typically for the era of activist-actors, it makes viewers less demanding about the ethical choices that performers make. Gormican’s silliness never equals that brilliant moment in Jack and Jill when Al Pacino — an actor as prone to overstatement as Cage — answers Adam Sandler’s question about his Oscar. And Gormican’s satire comes way late, long after the exhilarating surrealist interrogation of narcissism and the star system in Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich. The term “massive talent” reveals a publicist’s way of thinking. There’s nothing in this hellzapoppin lampoon to prevent one from remembering its Hollywood idolatry as The Unbearable Weight of Nicolas Cage.
