'The unbearable weight of a huge talent': Nicolas Cage laughs at himself as the savior of the daughter of the president of Catalonia

After entering his career in a final self-parodic drift in which, regardless of the films themselves, the essentials are his acting tics, his unmistakable screams, his faces of concentration or constipation and some roles directly designed and written for his abracadabra personality , Nicolas Cage still needed one last challenge: to play himself, Nicolas Cage, an actor in artistic decline but with a legion of fans halfway around the world, in one of his usual action movies, albeit with a parodic tone.

What we Spanish viewers did not expect is that he did it in an American production set in Mallorca, and that his character, that is, he himself, had the mission of freeing the daughter of the president of Catalonia, kidnapped by drug traffickers while enjoying

with her boyfriend on the couch

the end.

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“I am the person on planet Earth who has drawn Nicolas Cage the most times”

The architect of such an idea is the American Tom Gormican, director and co-writer, who has composed a self-referential work full of winks and explicitness to other Cage titles, including some conversations with himself, but in a more youthful version thanks to the makeup already the hairdresser: the already overacted and fabulous one in

by David Lynch, bangs in the wind, jerky movements of a rock star.

However, Gormican is a far cry from having the talent of Charlie Kaufman, the writer-director who set Cage to talk to his twin version of himself in a movie-within-a-movie story, the formidable

(2002), and who had previously orchestrated the work that, in principle, may have more parallels related to the self-flagellation of an actor with respect to his own career and style:

(1999).

Those were two postmodern works loaded with visual ideas, narrative and concept.

is a joke.

A buffoonery with a couple of funny moments and a few others, blushing, that will only interest admirers of the interpretive, vital and conceptual histrionics of Nic Cage.

If anything.

“This guy is a fucking legend”, says, in Spanish, the boyfriend of the daughter of the president of the Generalitat after finishing

and a few seconds before some criminals assault his room.

The self-referential theory has reached maximum heights in Cage's cinema during the last decade and a half, from balance to balance, but with occasional works of interest within that personal gear

The Oscar-winning actor for

is difficult to find an equal in the history of cinema, and only Jean-Claude Van Damme came close in

(2008) to something similar to that exercised by Cage in the present film.

Although, going much further back, perhaps a certain resemblance can be glimpsed with another cultural icon who ended his days disguised as himself and stretching his career as a myth to exhaustion, in his case, of terror: Bela Lugosi.

Like Cage, with four characteristic gestures.

An action-comedy with a redoubtable touch (“it must have been nice to have been a star”, a character even says to Cage), and without political overtones despite the matter of the

says it all already from its elephantine title.

It is an espionage nonsense for the gang, which will surely cheer every grimace of the actor, each one of his screams, each appearance of Paco León as an uncontrolled (and funny) mobster, and even the fact that the character of Pedro Pascal, a rich man able to pay a million dollars for the appearance of Cage on his birthday, is called none other than Javi Gutiérrez.

Seeing Nic trying to pronounce Javi's Spanish jota might be worth a ticket.

Or not.

THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF A HUGE TALENT

Direction:

Tom Gormican.

Cast:

Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Sharon Organ, Paco León.

Genre:

comedy.

USA, 2022.

Duration:

107 minutes.

Premiere: June 17.

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