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Friday, April 29, 2022

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent 2022 * * 1/2 Stars

TALENT AGENT

"It's grotesque, I'll give you $20,000 for it". That's such a Nic Cage moment in a movie about Nic Cage starring um, Nicolas Cage. Oh and there's a couple of scenes where Cage sees his Wild at Heart persona as a sort of kooky hallucination. Oh man, that hair.

Anyway, Nicolas Cage appears in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a rather dry action/comedy in which Cage plays himself (apparently in the same exact way he plays all his other characters). Cage's performance is good because well, it's no stretch. There's the overacting, the crescendo yells, and the massive craziness. This "cage" as usual, has been opened up and let loose.

Self-parodies and self-deprecation-s begot, "Talent" gives the audience those cultural references that any Nic Cage fan could salivate over (like myself). There's that famous line, "why couldn't you put the bunny back in the box?" (from Con Air of course). Then there's that "not the bees!" quip from The Wicker Man. Finally, there's a clip from Guarding Tess that Nic watches solemnly from a TV set in a hotel room. You think taking in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent would be the ultimate Nic Cage experience but it doesn't quite reach that plateau. It's almost underwhelming espy if you put it next to his best flicks (Con Air mentioned earlier, The Cotton Club, Face/Off, Leaving Las Vegas).

Like I said in the second paragraph, "Talent" is billed as an action/comedy. Well there's not a whole lot of laughs and the action scenes aren't really that bracing (you'd think with the R rating there'd be a little more something something). If anything, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a gimmickry vehicle in the Cage canon, a possible out of the box attempt to jump-start Nicky boy's iffy career (he's made some questionable stuff in the last couple of decades). Would I recommend "Talent?" Probably not. Hey at least it wasn't "unbearable" after one showing.

Written by Jesse Burleson

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