Now 58, with nearly 100 film credits since he was “Brad’s bud” in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” in 1982, Nicolas Cage has handled a lion’s share of money grabs in a career distinguished by a gratifying number of movies worth seeing, often just for him. Good material, bad material, big-budget studio clangers, low-budget indies on wry: The man does not coast.
The central gag in the occasionally funny action-comedy “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” imagines Cage, playing a variation on himself named Nick Cage at a career impasse.
Divorced, with a tenuous, tetchy relationship with a (fictional) teenage daughter played by Lily Mo Sheen, the movie’s version of Cage has run up a $600,000 tab at a fancy Los Angeles hotel and needs a job. His agent, Fink (Neil Patrick Harris), comes through with a prospect: For a cool, gallingly easy million, his client is to attend a superrich Cage fan’s birthday party on the island of Mallorca, Spain. There Cage will be the special guest star, required only to small-talk about his career, get some sun and sweat his future.
