Nicolas Cage definitely belongs to the narrow circle of the most controversial actors of our time. After winning an Oscar in the mid-1990s for his role as a suicide drunkard in “Leaving Las Vegas,” he starred as Cage in everything and anything. He has acted in many unimaginably bad films, he has almost started to turn into a caricature of himself, and in the last few years he seems to choose roles in which he almost ironizes himself and fucks himself well. The highlight of the banter at the expense of Nicolas Cage though is this action crime comedy written and directed by little known Northern Irish filmmaker Tom Gornican, the man will be so unknown that he doesn’t (yet) have his own page on Wikipedia.
And it is quite obvious that Gormican is one of Nicolas Cage’s superfans and everything here is full of references to various of his earlier films, and it was almost certain that this film about a fictionalized version of Nick Cage was not made at all. Cage initially refused to play himself three or four times, but eventually agreed, and although he claims that this fictionalized version has little to do with the real Cage, it is obvious that he is making a good joke here. The story in “The Unbearable Weight of Huge Talent” is actually quite banal and everything works mostly thanks to the good buddy energy of Cage and Pedro Pascal.
Pedro Pascal is a Spanish billionaire and Cage’s super-fan of Java who will offer his idol a million dollars to appear at his birthday party in Mallorca (Spain was correctly “played” by the Dubrovnik coast). Cage, on the other hand, is in a bad situation. And business because no one wants to hire him and considering leaving acting, but also family because he is a constant disappointment for his daughter Addy and ex-wife Olivia (Sharon Horgan) as he is an egomaniac who must constantly be the center of attention. Due to debts, he will be reluctant to accept the engagement and travel to Spain, where he will be hired by the CIA after someone kidnapped the daughter of a Spanish politician and it is suspected that the girl could be on the same island as Cage.
To make the situation more absurd, Nick Cage has an imaginary friend or himself somewhere in the Sailor Ripley phase of “Wild at Heart” who seems to represent some of his self-destructive side. Once Cage arrives in Mallorca, he will start a crazy chase and crazy situations that seem to have fallen out of his various previous films. Great, Cage teases at his own expense, pretends to be, and shows what his new shamanic acting method looks like. He and Javi have a little bit of LSD, everything is obviously intentionally pushed into absurdities and parodies of his classics such as “Gone in 60 Seconds”, “National Treasure”, “Adaptation” and “Leaving Las Vegas” and many others. . And it seems at times hilarious, and all the time grotesque, like the bizarre the best of Nick Cage, and the key is that Cage fully understood that the most important thing for a film like this is to play with the myth of himself.
