Film Review: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent: A Cage bromance for all ages
Critic’s Rating: 3.5/5
STORY: With his career on the verge of collapsing, Nick Cage (Nicolas Cage) reluctantly accepts a million-dollar offer to attend a billionaire fan’s birthday party in Spain (Pedro Pascal). Things take an unprecedented turn for the worse when Cage finds himself assisting the CIA against a notorious criminal.
REVIEW: A Nicolas Cage fangirl is kidnapped while watching one of his movies on a TV set within the first ten minutes of the film. Following that, Nicolas Cage, posing as Hollywood star Nick Cage (basically, himself), is clearly going through a difficult time in both his professional and personal life. His alter-ego, which is based on one of his younger avatars from his film Wild At Heart, reminds him that he is a movie star, not the actor he is now attempting to be. His therapist believes he works too much, while his ex-wife and daughter (Sharon Horgan and Lily Mo Sheen) believe he is too preoccupied with himself to divert attention away from himself. He loses out on a role in which he was very interested.
In short, Nick Cage’s life is on a downward spiral, with financial and emotional debts piling up. At this point, he accepts a million-dollar offer to pay a visit to his fan, Javi (Pedro Pascal), in Spain on his birthday. From there, a pleasant and unlikely bromance develops between Nick Cage and Javi, which takes a serious turn when the CIA gets involved and asks Cage to assist them in apprehending an international criminal, presumed to be Javi. This puts Javi and Cage in a bind. The climax is determined by Cage’s ability to pull himself, his ex-wife and daughter (both fictional characters created for the fictitious Nick Cage in this film), and Javi out of this sticky situation.
This film, co-written and directed by Tom Gormican, focuses on an unlikely friendship between Pascal and Cage’s characters, turning the proceedings into a pleasant buddy ride. Javi and Cage come from such diametrically opposed worlds, but their camaraderie and the kind of bond they form over movies and life experiences is endearing. Rather than focusing on self-indulgence in a film about a movie star, this film thrives on the bromance between a fan and a star without becoming nauseatingly narcissistic. It is, on the contrary, peppered with well-timed humour and action scenes.
In the plot, Nick Cage and his alter ego play only a minor role. More emphasis has been placed on developing Nick Cage as a character who is internally conflicted about where he sees himself going — at one point, he even decides to retire from acting entirely. The screenplay deftly blends straight-faced humour and sarcasm with references to Cage’s films such as Paddington 2, Con Air, Mandy, Moonstruck, The Croods 2, and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and Face/Off. Pablo Pascal’s character Javi is the type of fan that every celebrity secretly desires, emphasising the character development yet again.
The film combines elements of a Hollywood insider haha-fest, a spy film, and a breezy bromance in a funny and tasteful script. Although it’s difficult to imagine these ingredients in the same pot, the result works wonderfully on-screen — thanks to Pascal and Cage’s chemistry, their shared world in the film, which has its own kind of rulebook that one lap up, and the fact that none of the aforementioned elements become overbearing at any given time.
Satellite characters, such as Sharon Horgan and Tiffany Haddish (one of the film’s CIA operatives), on the other hand, have little to chew on, with the boys taking up the majority of the screen time. The climax feels a little sluggish, especially since you can start to predict where this one will really end halfway through.
To summarise, this meta-comedy will delight Nicolas Cage fans everywhere. The others may return with a list of movies to watch, converting them into fans as well.
