Nic Cage has given us some of the best action movies of all time (The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off) and some incredible dramas (Leaving Las Vegas, Bringing Out The Dead, Matchstick Men), and with his new movie The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, he's delivered maybe the best comedy of his career.
It's odd, because Cage has delivered some of the very best movies of his career in the last few years - Pig, Mandy, Color Out Of Space, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse - but he's also headed up a series of releases that absolutely nobody has ever heard of.
At a glance, which of these is a fake title for a recent Cage movie? Kill Chain, A Score To Settle, Jiu Jitsu, Pay The Ghost, Running With The Devil. Trick question, they're all Cage movies that have come out in the last five years or so, and we've heard of absolutely none of them.
And the thing is, even in most of these awful films, Cage himself is always interesting to watch. Sure, he seems to know which movies deserve his full Cage-ness and which are more likely to help with his end-of-year bank balances, but he never really phones it in.
It is this brilliant dichotomy that lies at the centre of his new movie, in which he plays "Nick Cage", the somewhat-fading-but-still-fantastically-talented Hollywood star who is toying with the idea of retiring from Hollywood entirely when his agent (Neil Patrick Harris) tells him that a super-fan Javi (Pedro Pascal) in Spain is willing to pay him $1 million just to attend his birthday party.
Initially offended by the thought of such a deal, Nick realises that he hasn't actually scored a big movie in a while, and he's living in an expensive hotel after his wife (Sharon Horgan) and daughter (Lily Sheen, real-life daughter of Kate Beckinsale) kick him out of their family home for being, well, a bit too much.
So, needing the money, Nick heads to Majorca and soon realises that he might have found a new BFF with movie-lover Javi, only for Nick to then get cornered by two CIA agents (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz), who inform him that his new pal is actually the head of an international crime syndicate and one of the most dangerous men in the world...
Of course, Nick finds it incredibly difficult to believe that Javi could be a danger to anyone - and Pescal plays the character perfectly in that he is adorable man-crushing one second and a potential psychopath the next - but in order to be sure, he offers to help Javi write a script that could be potentially based on their own blossoming friendship.
Through that, we get an incredible ride through Cage's own real-life career - so many of his movies get name-checked or directly referenced throughout, while Cage's own inner monologue is actually a conversation with his own younger self from Wild At Heart, complete with long hair and penchant for loudly elongating specific words mid-conversation - but also doubles a love-letter for the very concept of cinema.
Cage tries to open his daughter's mind to classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a silent German horror movie from 1920, but then turns his nose up at the thoughts of a modern "kids" movie being considered a classic movie... and then we get maybe the funniest scene of 2022: Cage crying his eyes out while watching Paddington 2.
There are some mild similarities to Adaptation, another self-reflexive Cage movie about movies, as well as Being John Malkovich, an odd deep dive on one specific Hollywood star, but in the end, this movie is very much its own thing.
Cage and Pascal combined deliver a bromance for the ages, while director and co-writer Tom Gormican (who only has one other credit to his name, 2014's incredibly forgettable rom-com That Awkward Moment) helps bring out another career-high best performance from Cage, and pairs it with a story that is both very, very funny and, for anyone who just loves watching good movies, incredibly poignant and insightful.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is released in Irish cinemas on Friday, 22 April.
Clip via Lionsgate UK
