The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent [2022]
“Well, it's impossible to be close to a 16 year-old.”
It’s difficult to imagine how a movie starring Nicolas Cage, about Nicolas Cage, could be boring… and yet, here we are. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent has somehow taken one of my go-to “good time” actors, and made a movie about him that… was only a marginally good time at best.
I’m not going to tear this apart narratively or talk about its lack of high-art components. This is a comedy about an actor who has made a career being over-the-top and being loved [and hated] for it. This isn’t something I expected stellar cinematography, writing, or score from. What I did expect was a certain element of fun that is sorely missing. There’s nobody wearing a bear costume punching villagers out, or saying “We’re going to steal the Declaration of Independence”, or luxuriously letting their mangy hair blow in the wind. Instead, nearly every chance the film has to cross that line into Cageville, they instead just do something cliché, trite, or boring. Somehow, a movie entirely about Nicolas Cage… seems to have forgotten to add in Nicolas Cage before putting the recipe into the oven.
Now, it’s not entirely devoid of fun. There are moments, and those moments are genuinely good; but what those moments are not, is worth the time. The experience tries to walk a tightrope of slightly cheeky self-awareness at who it’s about while also poking fun at movie tropes as it literally tells you where it is going next in a meta “movie about making a movie” way.
The problem is that it takes entirely too long to get anywhere that’s funny.
The film is only 1-hour and 46-minutes and my very first complaint when the credits rolled was that it was way too long… because I thought I’d just sat through a 2.5-hour comedy. Imagine my surprise when I actually checked the runtime.
Again, there are jokes throughout the whole movie, but they mostly aren’t clever and the first genuinely comical thing to happen isn’t until… Well, I actually don’t know the timestamp because I was ready to turn the whole thing off and move on by the time it happened, but it involves Pedro Pascal and Nicolas Cage slowly walking towards each other, both of them with a new [awkward] secret.
To say something positive about the film though; I want Nick and Pedro to work on more projects together. I like both of them independently, and they are very funny together. They’re both totally capable of playing serious and meaningful characters, but seem naturally inclined towards the theatric. On-screen together, they are very enjoyable.
All in all, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was neither silly enough, introspective enough, or meaningful enough to matter. If you are somebody that identifies as enjoying comedies in general, you’ll probably find this totally up to snuff if not hilarious. If they aren’t your thing, this certainly isn’t going to convince you otherwise.
The overall experience was nearly Unbearable, its length felt Massive, and I only made it through the whole thing because of the Talent of the two leads.
“You can have it. It's yours.”
