Nicolas Cage’s ‘Unbearable Weight’ Gets Rare Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score, a Career Best
After its premiere at the South by Southwest festival, Cage's new comedy has received a massive critics' score (so far)
Nicolas Cageis getting some of the best reviews of his career … for playing Nicolas Cage.
The actor’s new comedy,The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, currently has arare 100 percent critics‘ score on aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.
The reviews follow the film’s world premiere at the South by Southwest festival on Saturday night in Austin, Texas.
As there are only 15 reviews so far, it’s probable that the score will dip as more are added. But for now, it’s the highest-scoring film of the 170 Cage-credited titles on the site.
In the film, Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself who’s offered $1 million to appear at the birthday party of a megafan (Pedro Pascal). But the fan may not be as he seems, and “Cage” soon finds himself falling down a fun-house mirror rabbit hole of his past roles, eventually landing in a Cage-style action movie.
The Hollywood Reporter’s John DeForecalled it“a romp aimed at cultists who have sought out the Crazy Cage performances and forgiven the misfires in between.”Variety’s Owen Gleibermandubbed it“A commercial comedy that has a delirious good time poking fun at Nicolas Cage, celebrating everything that makes him Nicolas Cage — and, in the end, actually becoming a Nicolas Cage movie, which turns out to be both a cheesy thing and a special thing.”IndieWire’s Judy Dry gave it anA- and wrote, “There’s something for everyone inThe Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. It’s one of the funniest movies of the year.”
The film is currently hovering above some of Cage’s career-best performances in 2021’sPig(96 percent), 2002’sAdaptation(90 percent), 1987’sMoonstruck(94 percent), 1997’sFace/Off(92 percent), 1993’sRed Rock West(97 percent — an under-appreciated and underseen title, by the way) and 1995’sLeaving Las Vegas(91 percent) — for which Cage won an Oscar for best actor.
TheUnbearable Weightreviews are all the more ironic given Cage’s enormous initial reluctance to do the film. “I turned it down three or four times, I wanted no part of it,” the actortoldTHRin a recent candid interview. The actor also discussed the roller-coaster experience of making the film, explained why he’s accepted so many roles in recent years and broke down the method behind his acting madness.
