If you love Nicolas Cage, you’ll love this film—and who doesn’t love Nicolas Cage?! The star plays (a heavily fictionalized version of) himself in a script by Kevin Etten and director Tom Gormican. Together the two faithfully capture both the genius and the frustratingly less-than-genius of Cage’s enormous, enormously spotty screen career.
The best moments—Cage French-kissing a younger, Wild At Heart-era Cage and crowing about how awesome he is at smooching; a completely over-the-top wall-climbing-on-acid scene with the equally meta-mugging Pedro Pascal; a tearful viewing of Paddington 2; an underwater beer-drinking sequence—are up there with Cage at his most fully Cage. These are leavened with obsessive references to other Cage movies, from the sublime Face/Off to the less sublime Guarding Tess. Then everything is sprinkled about a Hollywood farrago of tired tropes, which the script gleefully identifies as tired tropes: a kidnapping plot; the actor who has to work for the CIA; a car chase; growing as a man by reconciling with his daughter; unlikely buddy duo fight the baddies, etc. etc.
The conventional aspects of the script are true to Cage’s workmanlike ethos; he’s never been afraid to appear in completely mundane tripe. It’s always a little disappointing to see him weighed down, though, and his cleaned-up, conventional emotional arc here seems like a missed opportunity. If you’re selling your movie to Cage lovers, why not go full Bad Lieutenant or Vampire’s Kiss? Why try to pacify us with chastened family man Cage when you could give us feral psychotic Cage just as easily?
But that’s the way the filmography goes. The next perfect Cage film may already be in the pipeline, groaning under the unbearable weight of massive talent. For now, you’ll have to settle for this merely intermittently awesome Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. R, 107 min.
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