The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent review: Nicolas Cage plays himself in surreal meta-comedy

There are some parts an actor was born to play. So you can forgive the typecasting of Nicolas Cage as an uncommonly intense middle-aged movie star named Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (in theaters April 22), a loopy fourth-wall-shattering goof of a movie whose showily meta premise is mostly cover for a sweet and surprisingly conventional action-comedy.

The Cage onscreen in Talent is a construct, albeit one who seems to share his real-life alter ego's taste for grand dojo hand gestures and kumquat-sized cocktail rings. In one of the film's earliest scenes, a desperate "Nic" — once a box-office king, now more known for the sheer volume of his roles — tanks a lunch meeting with a producer type at the leafy industry haunt Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. He can't help unleashing a full monologue in the man's vaguely terrified face at valet pickup, and that's this Cage's problem: He's always overwhelming whoever's in the room with the sheer tiger-blood energy of his enthusiasms, whether that's a wary bystander, his cringing teenage daughter (Lily Sheen), or his most recent ex-wife (Catastrophe's Sharon Horgan, perfectly wry and gratifyingly age-appropriate).

He's also famously fast and loose with money, so when his smarmy agent (Neil Patrick Harris) floats a $1 million dollar offer just to show up at a Spanish billionaire's birthday party, he reluctantly agrees; there's a $600,000 post-divorce hotel bill that's not going to pay itself. He also knows, at least on some level, that he desperately needs a comeback ("Not that I went anywhere"). Arriving bleary-eyed at a sun-struck private villa in Mallorca, he's both gratified and a little taken aback to find that his eager host, Javi (Pedro Pascal), is a Cage superfan of the highest, geekiest order; a man happy at first just to bask in his celebrity guest's glow, though he does, of course, have a screenplay he'd love him to check out.

Javi actually seems, beneath his fan-boy fervor and Gucci loafers, like a pretty nice guy. But the slow dance of their male bonding is soon rudely interrupted by Vivian (Tiffany Haddish) and Martin (Ike Barinholtz), two CIA agents with an agenda of their own: They'd like the actor to help them recover the kidnapped teenage daughter of a Catalan presidential candidate that they claim Javi, a ruthless international arms dealer, is holding hostage on his property. And why not, Cage reasons? His self-professed "nouveau shamanic" abilities as a thespian are nothing if not training for Mission: Impossible intrigue.

Martin and Vivian turn out to be less capable than most true-crime podcast enthusiasts at running a sting operation, so it's not long, unsurprisingly, before things go awry. Writer-director Tom Gormican (TV's Ghosted), who penned the amusingly scattershot script with Kevin Etten (Scrubs, Workaholics) mostly uses that incompetence as an excuse to launch several bravura set pieces, from a cat-burgling impeded by a paralytic nerve agent to an LSD trip gone spectacularly off the rails, with much use of the local Andalusian scenery.

Talent paints those bits in the broad comedic strokes of a caper, occasionally punctuated by the surreal appearance of Cage's younger, aggressively FaceTuned self as his own spirit animal, howling and raging against the dying of the Con Air light. (Master of None's Allesandra Mastronardi also appears as Javi's resourceful paramour, and Spanish actor Paco Léon as a sneering, bleach-haired gangster). Gormican never really does as much with his high-flying concept as he might; the movie's second half mostly gives way to antic chase scenes and general shenanigans. But Cage, so great and unexpectedly subdued in last year's small-scale indie drama Pig, has a ball with his own myth-making, a star contracting and expanding in the movie's fun-house mirror of fame and destabilized celebrity. Not that he ever went anywhere. Grade: B

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