Nicolas Cage plays himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. A shell of his former self, Nick Cage (Nicolas Cage) is struggling to find film roles and is considered a disappointment by his ex-wife Olivia (Sharon Horgan) and teenage daughter Addy (Lily Mo Sheen). Cage’s agent Richard Fink (Neil Patrick Harris) offers a job to make an appearance at the birthday party of Spanish superfan Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal). However, soon after arriving in Spain, Cage is intercepted by CIA agents Vivian (Tiffany Haddish) and Martin (Ike Barinholtz), who inform Cage that Javi is a drug kingpin and that they need his help to rescue the kidnapped daughter of the Spanish president.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a meta-comedy co-written and directed by Tom Gormican (That Awkward Moment), which sees Nicolas Cage play a somewhat exaggerated version of himself. With his acting career going down the tubes, Nick Cage is forced to accept to birthday party big for Javi Gutierrez, a superfan who has written a film he wants Cage to star in. However, despite Nick and Javi’s growing friendship with each other, Cage is recruited to be an informant for the CIA and locate a kidnapped woman.
After spending most of the last decade taking every role he could to pay off various debts, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a chance for Nicolas Cage to have fun mocking the persona he has developed for himself over his four-decade-long career. This includes Nick Cage having frequent conversations with his digitally de-aged younger self “Nicky,” the latter of which refuses to see himself as anything other than a movie star.
While The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent has a relatively straightforward “Hollywood celebrity becomes a CIA informant to spy on Spanish drug lord” plot, the film ends up being incredibly entertaining thanks greatly to the comic chemistry between Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal, with a paranoid acid trip being one of the most hilarious sequences in the film.
Ultimately, I would describe The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent as a mix of the meta career commentary of 2008’s J.C.V.D. and the equally meta Hollywood meets crime film of 1995’s Get Shorty. Nicolas Cage has said that he never phones it in with his film roles and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent proves him right.