Nicolas Cage’s new meta-comedy, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (Lionsgate rated R) was not what I had anticipated at all. First of all, it wasn’t very humorous as I expected it to be but it wasn’t unbearable and at the same time wasn’t the Cagiest film of the year either! Although the only aspect of it was that Nick Cage played himself his part very well considering it was a hard job and it’s no wonder the producers automatically thought no one other than Nicolas Cage could play himself better than he can. Director Tom Gormican who Nicolas Cage nicknamed “The Mind” wrote Nick a fan “love letter” to convince him to star in it. I’ll give him credit where credit is due for that but I wasn’t amused by the film at all and quite disappointed sorry to say. It just didn’t move me that much and I was quite bored by it.
Perhaps if I saw it at home streaming for the second time I might enjoy it better who knows?
The film was written and directed by Tom Gormican who wrote the screenplay with Kevin Etten. It was filmed in Dubrovnik, Croatia which was used as the backdrop representing Mallorca, Spain, and also in Los Angeles, CA for the other scenes.
When the film premiered at SXSW it scored a very rare 100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer but then dropped to 87%. It was blitzed all over the media as Nicolas Cage’s big comeback film hyping it up as The Great Cage-assance The Age of Cage The Most Cagiest Film ever, etc.
The amazing thing was my sister Patti and I were the only souls in the entire theater so we were very lucky that we got a private screening and were loving every minute of it! This is a first and has never happened before where we had an exclusive private screening.
The producers never explained in interviews why they titled it The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and that’s a shame that they left that fact out; that’s one of the questions I would have asked them or Nick himself if they let me interview them.
The meta-comedy wasn’t comedic at all and didn’t do itself any justice. The film is supposed to be a fictionalized version of Nicolas Cage but calls himself “Nick Cage” based on real-life events that occurred with him and snippets and references of his prior films were used in this film. I don’t want to give away any spoilers here—but his alter-ego Nicky is supposed to be the obnoxious younger self who is bossy and advises the older Nick on what to do with his career and life or his conscious of the older Nick and I resented that the movie was over-promoted with video clips and trailers on YouTube which give or take has some spoilers attached. It gave much of the film away and for that reason that may be the case why people weren’t rushing out to the theater. The critics and the cast and crew and die-hard fans advised all Nick Cage fans that the best place to see it is actually in a theater. Not so fast! It’s available already for pre-order on streaming and some prefer to see it at home on their big-screen TVs when it’s released. Check out this clip here:
The film was over-hyped too much with previews of the video clips on YouTube. I think that’s what really ruined it for me and probably for other Nicolas Cage fans too! Their error was they didn’t give the fans a chance to express their own opinions about the film itself after seeing it and the trailers spoiled the experience which made the film look more exciting than it actually was!
I rate this film a B.-