Movie, music and TV reviews by Matt Neal, a Rotten Tomatoes-accredited ABC Radio film critic (also an author, musician, journalist and all-round okay guy).
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi, Russell Crowe.
The judges of American Idol had been through some shit.
Apparently this is an unpopular opinion in some quarters of MCU fandom, but I desperately want to see Taika Waititi direct a third Thor film.
His take on Thor, in cahoots with the God of Thunder himself Hemsworth, has been a far funnier, wackier Odinson than what had been seen before. The tone of the films was in line with Waititi's own Kiwi sense of humour, but Thor also became a more comedic character, to the chagrin of some fans.
I like it. In Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame, the Thunder God is a profoundly affected by his time among humans and from suffering loss - something he's not had to reconcile with as an Asgardian. He's absorbed humanity like a virus and doesn't fully understand how that sits with his godhood. Humility weighs unevenly on his immortality, and his profound power is ill-at-ease alongside the traits he's picked up from his Midgardian acquaintances.
Thus Love & Thunder finds him in search of himself and his place in the universe. Having set off with the Guardians of the Galaxy at the end of Endgame, he roams space, bouncing from one distress call to the next, smiting evil with his mighty battleaxe, and winning the day.
But it all feels so hollow and empty. He's missing something in his life - and that something is Jane Foster (Portman), his ex-girlfriend. But when he sees her again, he's in for a massive surprise.
Combining the Mighty Thor comic series with the God Butcher series is a masterstroke from Waititi and co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. We get great arcs for Jane Foster as she becomes the Mighty Thor and uses that persona to battle her own demons, and we get Gorr (Bale), who is a worthy villain with a worthwhile backstory, cut from the same potentially understandable cloth as Thanos or Ultron or Scarlet Witch. Portman and Bale relish the extra depth in what could easily have been thin characters, and help make the whole thing work.
The humour is a fine balance amid the bleaker elements of the story; as he did with Jojo Rabbit, Waititi manages to work a deft line between the morbid moments and the hilarity. It something he excels at - just watch his breakthrough films Boy and Hunt For The Wilderpeople and note the darker realities lurking below the surface, and how comfortably-yet-uncomfortably they sit with everything else.
The same thing is on display in Love & Thunder. Cancer and mortality mix with the futility of life itself, while heartbreak and love battle it out. The whole thing is a damning diatribe against religion when looked at from Gorr's angle, a sad story of the inevitably of death when looked at from Jane Foster's side, and an examination of the devastations of lost love from Thor's perspective. The idea that Waititi has made the Thor films throwaway comedic fluff is nonsense.
Waititi's perfect use of Guns N' Roses is also to be commended, while there are visual flourishes (a fight in the Shadow Realm in particular) that are impressive. Some of the battles and action sequences feel a bit samey, as is to be expected 28 films into a saga, but there are moments where you can see Waititi is striving to bring some flair to the long-running party.
Waititi deserves a third film to close out his own Thor trilogy. If anyone is going to end the Thor saga, should Hemsworth want to hang up his cape, it must be Waititi.
This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio across regional Victoria on July 7, 2022.
(M) ★★★
Director: Baz Luhrmann.
Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Kelvin Harrison Jr., David Wenham, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Luke Bracey.
"Ladies and gentlemen, here's a little song called Spinal Meningitis Got Me Down."
Baz Luhrmann certainly has a style, and his visual flamboyance and love of a red curtain spectacle would appear to put him in good stead for this attempt at being the definitive Elvis biopic.
But Baz is his own worst enemy. For every moment of welcome flair in this lengthy drama, there are half a dozen of style-over-substance. The film's first hour is packed with so many unnecessary camera moves, cuts, edits, and crossfades, that it's like being on an out-of-control carnival ride. It's like an explosion at both the bell and neighbouring whistle factories.
It's only in the second half, when Luhrmann calms down, that the film truly engages, and Butler's stunning performance is able to shine through and become more than just a caricature.
Told partially from the point of view of Elvis' manager Colonel Tom Parker (Hanks), the film hits every big checkpoint in the Elvis wikipedia page - his early breakthrough with It's Alright, Mama, his controversial early TV and stage performances, joining the army, marrying Priscilla, his Hollywood stint, the comeback special, and through into the Vegas years and his untimely death, aged 42.
Elvis, its directorial tics aside, is a solid potted history of its subject. Diehard Elvis fans may be disappointed, and if you're looking for a deep dive into what made The King tick, this ain't it, but the film is at least a board overview of his world-changing career.
In a tough role, Butler excels. He captures the stage mannerisms and vocal particulars perfectly, but really flies in the latter half of the film as the troubles settle in. Butler makes Presley human, even as the shopping list of plot points whirls past in a blur of camera tricks and pointless editing stunts.
Equally impressive is Hanks as Parker. Hanks, in one of his few villainous roles, brings layers and complexity to a character that, like Presley, could have ended up being a caricature. In a film where so many characters are mere ciphers, the glue of Presley and Parker - of Butler and Hanks - holds proceedings together.
But for every clever line, such as Parker's manipulations, there is a naff one, usually involving Presley's family or to describe what Presley thinks and feels instead of showing us. For every awesome musical moment (and there are many) there is a saccharine score to beat you over the head, practically yelling at you to feel a particular way. For stunning moment of production design to recapture the era, there's a directorial move with the camera or in the editing suite or in the special FX department that is present for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Luhrmann's kookiness and over-egging style as a director can have its moments, but his latest film is laden with the same problems that beset his previous one, The Great Gatsby. The movie works best when Luhrmann stops showing off, and gets out of the way of the story and the actors. The constant distractions of direction suck the emotion out of the film, bloat its storytelling, and quickly infuriate.
It's only the work of Butler and Hanks, and a mid-film chill pill for Luhrmann that make Elvis a decent overview of one of modern history's most important figures. Luhrmann's stylistic tics mean the film avoids some tropes of the music biopic genre, and there is an admirable boldness to his approach, but the definitive word on the King of Rock 'n' Roll is yet to be filmed.
Cast: James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter, Raymond Burr, Wendell Corey, Judith Evelyn, Ross Bagdasarian, Georgine Darcy, Sara Berner, Frank Cady, Jesslyn Fax, Irene Winston, Rand Harper, Havis Davenport.
The binoculars confirmed it: the man was not wearing flesh-coloured pants.
"Let's start from the beginning again, Jeff. Tell me everything you saw, and what you think it means."
- Lisa Fremont
When you get down to it, making movies is about two key questions: "what's the story?" and "how will you tell it?".
In the case of Rear Window, the first answer is nothing special - it's a murder mystery. Man kills wife, nosy neighbour pieces together clues to solve it.
What makes this an exceptional film is how the story is told. And this is where the genius of Alfred Hitchcock comes into play.
"I think I'm more impressed by how Rear Window was made rather than the end product," reviewer The Incredible Suit notes in his ranking of Hitchcock films, "but it's undeniably unique filmmaking (if you don't count the Christopher Reeve remake)".
Indeed, Rear Window's superlative skill is to put you alongside the protagonist unlike any film has done so before or since. Almost every shot is filmed in or from the apartment of LB "Jeff" Jeffries (Stewart) - a photographer laid up with a broken leg, who finds himself with nothing to do but watch his many neighbours go about their lives in their apartments across the courtyard.
By placing the camera next to Jeff, we became complicit in his increasing voyeurism. We join him as he enjoys the music from the pianist's apartment, empathises with Miss "Lonely Hearts" at ground level, grins knowingly at the newlyweds behind the pulled blind, and finds it hard to look away from Miss "Torso" as she does her ballet warm-ups in her underwear. We're also drawn into the slow-burn mystery building in the apartment of Lars and Anna Thorwald at the same pace that Jeff is, as we see what he sees.
As noted in The Wordsworth Book of Movie Classics, the "restrictions" of trapping the film's hero in one room - and the audience with him - allowed "the viewer to feel the claustrophobia of his predicament and share his voyeuristic impulses".
There's that word again: "voyeur". Rear Window's key theme is voyeurism - within 90 seconds of the opening credits finishing, we see a woman drop her bra, then bend over in her pink underwear to pick it up. There's a very real "male gaze" thing going on here, but this titillation also goes to show the unimpeded view Jeff gets of his neighbours and their private lives. It also helps, rightly or wrongly, give us a gradual acceptance of Jeff's voyeurism - if everything is so openly on display, then what harm is there in looking, right? And if someone's life is on the line, then perhaps the right thing to do is look, right? Right?
French director François Truffaut suggested the film was an analogy for films themselves - "the courtyard is the world, the reporter/photographer is the filmmaker, the binoculars stand for the camera and its lenses," he wrote in 1954. The Incredible Suit agreed, calling it "a film about films, full of tiny cinema screens".
The film is also about neighbours and the perceived dying days of community. Jeff watches his neighbours, but never interacts with them. A dark twist involving a dead dog sparks a rant about what makes for good neighbours: "You don't know the meaning of the word 'neighbours'! Neighbours like each other, speak to each other, care if somebody lives or dies! But none of you do!". The rant, which is bellowed to the world at large, is startling, coming out of nowhere. But it aptly sums up the film's voyeurism in a different way, while articulating that classic yet misguided belief of every era - that society was better in the previous one, and that the current era has gone to the dogs (so to speak).
Rear Window is also, oddly, a film about love. Through the windows into other lives we see newlyweds at it like rabbits, the bickering married couple, the young lady fighting off suitors, the lonely lady dreaming of a partner, and the older lady content in her singledom. And then there's Jeff and his perfect girlfriend Lisa (the perfect Grace Kelly).
Jeff wants to break-up with Lisa because she's "too perfect", which is his way of saying she's out of his league and social bracket, but also because he sees their lives going in different directions, and he views marriage as a kind of curse. This crisis of commitment makes sense in the context of their obvious but unspoken age difference, which makes this May-December relationship far more palatable than Kelly and Gary Cooper in High Noon, or Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo.
Stewart's Jeff is a man on the edge of curmudgeonism and driven to distraction by his boredom. In a nice metaphor, his eyes are always on the horizon, chasing the next story, which happens to be taking place outside his window, and not what's happening in his own apartment. He struggles to see how Kelly's Lisa fits in to that, and Stewart nails his frustrations, fears and fervours in one of his best performances.
Kelly is also at the top of her game in a "surprisingly carnal" turn, as Joshua Klein put it in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. Her wounded moments hurt, yet she's also convincingly strong and daring, making the varying levels of her character feel like a real person. Jeff laments her "perfection", but by the gods, she does indeed seem perfect.
Thelma Ritter as the nurse Stella is great comic relief, bringing some sass to her sidekick role, while across the way a brooding Raymond Burr is a great mix of quiet and shady, fuelling the possibility Jeff may be mistaken for long enough. And when Burr finally gets his big moment, he delivers.
Quick fact: that's Ross Bagdasarian AKA David Seville as the frustrated pianist providing much of the film's diegetic score. He's best known for inventing The Chipmunks AKA Alvin, Simon and Theodore.
And while it's the "how" of the story that sells Rear Window, the screenplay is an under-appreciated gem of the genre. The mystery unfolds in a way that rewards repeat viewings, while there is an equally potent and important slowburn happening in our complicity with Jeff's growing voyeurism. The way characters around the courtyard are built without dialogue is also some nifty storytelling.
There are other fascinating factors at play that help sell the drama. There's the remarkable set, the biggest ever built at Paramount Studios at the time, featuring running water and electricity in every fake apartment, and a complex drainage system to handle the fake rain ("Watching it is like watching a living, breathing ecosystem," Klein notes in 1001 Movies).
There's the perfect pacing which winds the tension tighter and tighter, a sublime sense of mood conjured by the use of music and lighting, an excellent cast, and, as is often the case, Hitchcock making all the right moves at the right times.
As William Bayer put it in his 1973 book The Great Movies, Rear Window "comes very close to being the perfect Hitchcock film, the one that illustrates nearly all his major strengths". Bayer cites Hitchcock's love of voyeurism, his passion for a technical challenge, the multi-layered narrative, the strong visuals, and the common Hitchcockian motif of "an extraordinary thing happening in an everyday situation to an average person".
It's true. Psycho may be more daring and thrilling (and ultimately better), and Vertigo certainly has its fans for its unique stylings and deep themes, but Rear Window is the quintessential Hitchcock film.
Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Paddy Considine, Rafe Spall, Billie Whitelaw, Edward Woodward, Adam Buxton, Olivia Colman, Ron Cook, Kenneth Cranham, Peter Wight, Julia Deakin, Kevin Eldon, Paul Freeman, Karl Johnson, Lucy Punch, Anne Reid, David Threlfall, Stuart Wilson, Bill Bailey, Martin Freeman, Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan.
Detective Swan and his colleagues were in hot pursuit.
Consider the lily.
Or, in the case of Edgar Wright's flawless comedy Hot Fuzz, consider specifically the Japanese peace lily.
This seemingly innocuous flowering plant is one example of the genius hidden in plain sight in Hot Fuzz's script, written by director Wright and star Simon Pegg. The film is remarkable in many ways, but the script is, to quote the script itself, "off the chain".
Like so many other things in Hot Fuzz, the lily is not just one thing; nothing in Hot Fuzz is only ever one thing. Almost every moment, object, joke, and line of dialogue does an incredible amount of heavy lifting, and the lily is a prime example. This is sharp writing that's especially rewarding for the audience, but also efficient, allowing more room for even more moments, objects, jokes and narrative elements, which is even more rewarding for the audience. It also enhances the film's rewatchability, which, again, is rewarding for the audience.
So let us consider the lily.
The first mention of the lily comes during a conversation between Nicholas Angel, played with wonderful balance by Pegg, and his ex Janine (a near-faceless cameo from Cate Blanchett). She calls it a rubber plant, he corrects her - a great show-don't-tell moment. The whole conversation is a mini-info-dump about their recent break-up, but we also learn Nicholas is pedantic, by the book, married to his job, and feels being right is important, both in broad terms of justice and the small-scale terms of a conversation. The lily correction is just one example, but a very key one, of Nicholas' character.
Soon after, we get the excellent high-speed montage of Nicholas moving to the country, which is made all the more amusing by Nicholas clinging to this lily. It also adds pathos - we start to care about Nicholas in part because he cares about the lily. It's kinda sad to see a grown man with no family, no friends, no pets, forced to relocate holding close his most treasured possession, which is a plant.
As Nicholas's relationship with his colleague Danny Butterman (Frost) grows, Nicholas tries to buy Danny a Japanese peace lily for his birthday. This coincides with a major plot point - while Nicholas is outside the nursery retrieving his notebook, Leslie the florist (Reid) is murdered, leading to a thrilling foot chase and Nicholas thinking he's closer to uncovering the murderer.
Now let's hone in on the plotting of this scene. It could have taken place anywhere. Nicholas could have bought something else for Danny - he knows of his love of action movies, so he could have bought him some DVDs or a poster or something connected to that passion. He knows Danny loves Cornettos - he could have bought a bulk supply of the ice creams. Both these ideas work, and the scene could have played out the same way, with Leslie running the local video shop or milk bar. Nothing changes to the plot, and the movie still works.
But the gift of the peace lily is far more personal, so it has far more impact, both when we see Nicholas ask if Leslie has any peace lilies, and later when he tells Danny what he was trying to purchase for him. This plant that had previously been a joke and a symbol of Nicholas' pedantry and loneliness becomes a symbol of what Danny is beginning to mean to Nicholas - a symbol of their blossoming friendship, if you will.
And later, when Nicholas fights for his life against Michael "Lurch" Armstrong in Nicholas' hotel room, the pot of the peace lily proves an effective and ironic weapon. It's almost a literal take on Chekhov's gun, which is the idea that if you show a gun in the first act, it has to go off in the second or third act.
More accurately, Chekhov's gun is a screenwriting principle which says that every element of the story must be necessary, and all irrelevant elements should be removed. And that's something Hot Fuzz adheres to, although it goes one better by making the necessary elements necessary for multiple reasons.
To wit: the simple act of doing a crossword is a clever comedic sketch, a portent of things to come, and eventually an opportunity for pithy action-movie one-liners. The model village is a stereotypically quaint (and vaguely hilarious) small-town tourist attraction, an ideal setting for a King Kong Vs Godzilla-style finale, and a wonderfully symbolic and foreshadowing narrative device - the darkness at the heart of Sandford comes from its residents' quest to be "a model village".
Wright and Pegg's script is filled with countless examples of this multi-layered thinking. Even "yarp" does heavy-lifting beyond its jokiness. It's initially a gag about inbred country folk, but later becomes used as a moment of tension important to the plot, followed by a great gag to release the tension ("narp?").
Similarly, the over-the-top nature of action movies is used as a joke that demonstrates the naivety of Danny in contrast to the seriousness of Nicholas, but also a bonding moment between the pair, a source of parody and comedy, and an opportunity for massive third-act action sequences.
This aspect of the film is also impressive - Hot Fuzz is simultaneously a spoof and loving homage of the action genre. It manages to somehow have its cake and eat it too.
As with Shaun Of The Dead's deep love of George Romero and zombie films, Wright and Pegg invest their own passion for the tropes and clichés of action movies, but send it up by being typically British about the whole thing. The pair reportedly watched 138 action films as research for writing Hot Fuzz - everything from Chuck Norris B-movies to classics like Dirty Harry and LA Confidential - but remained intent on infusing what they had seen with their own Englishness.
"There isn't really any tradition of cop films in the UK," Wright told the New York Post in 2007.
"We've got a lot of TV cop shows, but we wanted to make a cop film. We felt that every other country in the world had its own tradition of great cop action films and we had none."
The first draft of Hot Fuzz took nine months, and the re-writes stretched out for another nine months.
It shows - there's not a wasted moment in the film. It takes less than 10 minutes for the story to arrive in Sandford, by which point we understand who Nicholas Angel is, what the tone of the film is, the film's sense of humour, and the filmic language of exaggerated sound FX and sharp edits that it's using. Not to mention cameos from Cate Blanchett, Peter Jackson, Bill Nighy, Martin Freeman and Steve Coogan, amid a who's who cast of British comedy.
Hot Fuzz is an incredibly rare beast. It's a laugh-out-loud comedy that boasts one of the sharpest and best written scripts of any genre of the era. It's both a piss-take and a love letter. It's built on clichés and tired tropes yet it's something completely new and fresh. In short, Hot Fuzz is an unrepeatable masterpiece of both the buddy-cop action genre and the comedy genre.
This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio across regional Victoria on May 26, 2022.
(MA15+) ★★
Director: Alex Hardcastle.
Cast: Rebel Wilson, Sam Richardson, Mary Holland, Zoë Chao, Justin Hartley, Chris Parnell, Angourie Rice, Avantika Vandanapu, Michael Cimino, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Brandon Scott Jones, Ana Yi Puig, Zaire Adams, Molly Brown.
"You can't call people 'old AF' - that's not very woke."
High school is, was, and probably always will be difficult. There are good bits, but they're usually peppered in between the heartbreaks, bullying, self-doubts, mistakes and the general awkwardness of being a teenager. Somehow, for most people anyway, high school manages simultaneously to be one of the best and worst times of your life.
Good teen movies understand this. They empathise with their subjects and audience of teens and former teens. The lows are like mortal blows that we all feel, and the highs remind us of our own small victories. Good teen movies get what it is to be a teen.
Senior Year is partly a fish-out-of-water comedy, but it's mainly a teen movie, and it's on this front that it fails. Its characters are caricatures and there is little-to-no empathy for teenage life. And there's nothing Rebel Wilson or anyone else can do to save the film.
Wilson plays Steph, who awakes from a coma after 20 years with one aim in life - to return to high school and pick up where she left off. That means throwing herself back into high school, trying to be prom queen, and regaining her status as the most popular girl in school.
Naturally Steph is going to learn some life lessons, but her dim-witted desires make it hard to get on board with her quest. When we finally get an insight into why it means so much to her to be prom queen, it actually doesn't really make sense.
Not that the rest of the film does. Steph almost dies when she lapses into a coma, and it's caught on camera, but there are no recriminations for the perpetrator. But more frustrating is the film's narrow view of its main teen characters, none of whom seem like real people, despite the best efforts of the cast.
Wilson is a prime example. Only sporadically amusing, Steph never comes across as an actual person despite Wilson's earnest efforts. It only makes it harder to care about her situation. It also amplifies the idea that Wilson doesn't have what it takes to lead a film. This is probably not true, but this isn't the movie that will change minds.
All of this would matter little if the film was actually funny, but outside of the efforts of Mary Holland (whose timing and delivery is perfect), very few jokes land. So many gags hit like "teens are too woke LOL" or "teens are too fixated on being insta-famous LOL", both of which feel like simplifications that aren't even that funny to start with.
The occasional pop culture reference works, but the film suffers from failing to either properly parody teen movies or be one.
With every addition to the MCU, a growing number of critics ask the question of when the Marvel bubble will burst.
Everything ends, after all, and the departure of figurehead characters Iron Man and Captain America has made many wonder if the end is nigh.
The strangely flat The Eternals helped spur this line, though the massive success of Spider-Man: No Way Home gave pause for thought. That could be dismissed as an aberration due to the webslinger’s inbuilt popularity and the film’s audacious “multiverse” plot line, which tied together two decades of character legacy in a beautifully satisfying way.
But this second solo outing for Marvel's Sorcerer Supreme is likely to spark further discussions about how much fuel the MCU has in the tank. The film is good without being great, and while it's daring in some ways and does a few tonal things not previously seen in the franchise, it will ultimately be remembered for its fan-service cameos rather than its remarkable plotting or character development.
The film finds Dr Strange (Cumberbatch) troubled by nightmares in which he fails to save a young girl (Gomez). When that girl appears in real life fleeing from a many-tentacled demon, Strange is sucked into an interdimensional battle that sees him flung across the multiverse and battling alternate versions of himself.
The much-heralded return of Sam Raimi to the Marvel fold has its upsides - namely a sporadic horror bent that keeps Multiverse Of Madness feeling fresh. Whether it be a rotting corpse rising from the dead or a baddie limping down a dimly lit corridor like a zombie, the movie stands out from the other previous 27 MCU instalments when Raimi lets his inner Evil Dead out to play.
Outside the horror and the occasional sense of dread, the rest of the film is merely okay. The biggest disappointment lies in Gomez's America Chavez - not through any fault of Gomez's, but due to the script. Chavez is reduced to little more than her multiversal powers. She basically becomes the movie's MacGuffin, her arc is left unresolved, and her biggest impact on the film is to help humanise and test Strange, rather than truly grow as a person, beyond a horribly cliched and predictable final showdown.
While it leaves Chavez frustratingly undeveloped, her presence helps shape Strange's journey and amplifies the film's themes about morality. So much of the story is predicated on the definitions of right and wrong, of the greater good vs the necessary sacrifice, of the choices we make, and the murky spaces in between. This stuff is fascinating, and also helps give us a villain whose motivations are understandable and occasionally truly frightening.
Ultimately this film's genuinely surprising guest spots and Raimi's dalliances with his dark past are the most memorable bits. The rest serves as solid development for the increasingly heroic Stephen Strange, played with growing ease by the perfectly cast Cumberbatch, in between some so-so moments.
Multiverse Of Madness gives good villain but disappointing sidekick, throws up some interesting ideas about choices and morals, and tries admirably to introduce some new flavours to the infinite stew that is the MCU. Will it be enough to keep Kevin Fiege's pot bubbling? More than likely for now.
This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio across regional Victoria on April 28, 2022.
(M) ★★★★
Director: Tom Gormican.
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Sharon Horgan, Lily Sheen, Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz, Alessandra Mastronardi, Neil Patrick Harris.
Jokes - not for everyone.
The post-modern thing of an actor playing themselves in a film has a couple of stellar examples - Being John Malkovich is a modern classic, while Jean-Claude van Damme's little-seen JCVD attracted the best reviews of his career.
You can add to that list this wonderfully absurd comedy in which Nicolas Cage plays himself and his insane alter-ego Nicky Cage. It's hard to imagine anyone else being able to deliver such a high-wire act of naturalism and self-parody, or anyone else with the chops, balls and craziness to pull it off.
Perhaps that's why director Tom Gormican pursued Cage (who turned it down three or four times) so hard for the role. No other actor has the actual acting capabilities, action hero cred, and bonkers mythology to make this work.
Cage plays a fictionalised version of himself who is washed up and on the verge of quitting acting. When a billionaire uber-fan (Pascal) hires Cage to be a celebrity guest at his birthday party, an unwitting friendship is born. But the CIA is lurking on the periphery, hoping Cage will help them solve a kidnapping case with geopolitical implications.
Part-buddy comedy, part-goofy actioner, part-Cage-spotting worship-athon, The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent is unexpectedly hilarious, fun, and clever. It unfolds in a pleasingly predictable manner, but is elevated by Cage's willingness to go along with everything and his utterly charming partnership with Pascal. The latter makes for a wonderful foil to Cage's dynamism, bringing a wide-eyed charm to mega-fan Javi.
The meta-ness of Cage playing Cage is a highlight, but even more so when he's playing "Nicky Cage" - a Vampire's Kiss era version of himself that is utterly insane. Equally fun and meta is the film script that Javi and Cage start writing together and the way it mirrors what actually plays out in The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent. It's this sharpness that elevates this beyond being a one-note joke.
The supporting cast beyond Pascal, particularly Horgan and Haddish, is great, and everything moves at a good pace. The finale is suitably meta, and helps the whole thing lock together. And it's funny - one of the funnier movies to hit the big screen in a while.
No one else could have worked as well in the lead role of this particular movie, so kudos to Gormican for pursuing Cage, and kudos to Cage for having enough self-awareness and courage to go along with it.
