‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’ Film Review: Nicolas Cage Is Nicolas Cage in Meta-Comedy

SXSW 2022: The star’s thoughtfully self-parodying performance aside, this film seems more interested in inside-baseball fan service than anything else

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate

Nicolas Cage’s sometimes over-the-top performances, complete with meme-worthy lifted brows and bulging eyeballs, are getting their own showcase. “People think I’m not in on the joke,” the headline of his 2013 Guardian profile reads. Lest there be any doubt, he’s now acted in and produced a feature-length film to prove his point.  

Channeling the meta-ness of “Adaptation,” Cage stars in “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” as a debt-ridden, washed-up actor named Nick Cage and as Nicky, his alter ego and a bad angel of sorts who appears to be 1980s-vintage Cage, here to facilitate internal dialogue. Per the film’s concocted biographical details, he has an ex-wife named Olivia (Sharon Horgan), a makeup artist he met on the set of “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” and a teenage daughter named Addy (Lily Mo Sheen), who thinks Humphrey Bogart was an adult film performer.

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