[imagesource: Lionsgate]

Nicolas Cage is a bit of an oddball.

Do you mind if I call you Nic? Cool.

I enjoyed Nic’s performance as a truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness in Pig, and the reviews were pretty good across the board.

His latest project, playing himself in an action-comedy, is the talk of Tinseltown.

Before we get to those reviews, here’s a synopsis via Lionsgate:

Nicolas Cage stars as… Nick Cage in the action-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Creatively unfulfilled and facing financial ruin, the fictionalized version of Cage must accept a $1 million offer to attend the birthday of a dangerous superfan (Pedro Pascal).

Things take a wildly unexpected turn when Cage is recruited by a CIA operative (Tiffany Haddish) and forced to live up to his own legend, channeling his most iconic and beloved on-screen characters in order to save himself and his loved ones.

With a career built for this very moment, the seminal award-winning actor must take on the role of a lifetime: Nick Cage.

I refuse to address him as Nick. It just feels wrong.

Trailer time:

The New York Post gave the film the thumbs-up:

Nicolas Cage is starring in a new film about Nicolas Cage that successively drives home why Nicolas Cage is an essential movie star…

While Hollywood is becoming more self-serious than they’ve ever been and clearly cannot take a joke — hello, Will Smith! — it’s good to have guys like him around. His self-deprecating sense of humor is an oasis in an industry where most people strut around like United Nations diplomats.

One more time for the back row: Nicolas Cage!

Nic Cage!

Sorry, everybody was doing it.

IGN Africa is also all aboard the Cage train:

Nothing about this movie would work if Cage couldn’t give himself over entirely to the film’s vision of what it means to be Nicolas Cage. But then again, giving himself over entirely to a role pretty much is what it means to be Nicolas Cage, so maybe there was never anything to worry about.

WIRED says “it may seem like just a weird comedy about Nicolas Cage. But it’s so much more than that”:

 Massive Talent doesn’t seek to interrogate the man behind the meme, but rather to dig into the lore of an actor so capable of surfacing enthusiasm that he has impacted a ridiculous range of cinephiles.

In that, it finds the power of myths to inspire. Nick Cage, the now-canonized folk hero of the real-life man he’s meant to satirize, is an embodiment of everything cinema can be.

Right, let’s wrap this up. There have been some stinging reviews (two stars from The Guardian) but you can’t please everyone.

Am I going to spend 107 minutes of my life watching Nic Cage being Nic Cage in a movie sort of about Nic Cage?

Maybe. I definitely will watch his dramatic entrance on Wogan, a British talk show in 1990:

In honor of seeing “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” tonight, here is the greatest talk show entrance in history. #MassiveTalent #NicCage pic.twitter.com/hgyNi0iiZP

— GR Colombini (@grcolombini) April 22, 2022

That is peak Nic Cage.

[sources:lionsgate&nypost&ignafrica&wired]