The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)

The shortest summary for "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent" would be: a larger budget replica for what was "JCVD" for Jean-Claude Van Damme in 2008, but this time dedicated to Nicolas Cage. In a slightly longer summary, we have a fiction where the main character is the real actor that gets into a "filmic" situation. The concept is not new, but is so rarely used that looking at what we had on the big screen during latest years it's quite refreshing (ironically, given the amount "historical" references).

Nicolas Cage is.. Nicolas Cage, an actor with a declining career path, taking a "job" as special guest to the anniversary party of a superfan, who is also super rich, living on the coast of Spain. We quickly get to find out that the guy is the main target of an entangled investigation covering the kidnapping of a politician's daughter, contacts with the Napoli mafia, and pretty much everything we could find in a classic "action movie". Like that, Nicolas Cage gets promoted from action hero to real agent working for the CIA. And from there the real life starts mixing with the movie life, up to reaching a classic happy end.

The movie doesn't take itself too seriously, and it's good that gets clear from start in a script with a bunch of self-irony, the typical exaggerations found in a '90s action movie, and lots of references to the top box-office roles made by Nicolas Cage during that time. I imagine that quite a lot of the younger public would be lost and not get all the references to "Face Off", "The Rock" or others. It's clearly a movie dedicated to who has watched Nicolas Cage in his top action star period. That's the main ingredient required for getting a real taste of this movie. If you cut this part, what's left is a light comedy with plenty of action, relatively fine as script complexity for this genre. This is different from "JCVD", which I'm not remembering that well, but it left me an impression of more substance within the self-irony at the time I watched it. In the current case, what we have fits to the category "guilty pleasure, fun to watch", but not more than that. Which is perfectly ok, if that's what you'd expect ;)

Rating: 4 out of 5 (I'm nostalgic = quite subjective on this one)