The one movie Nicolas Cage vowed to avoid forever: “I’m never going to see that”
There can’t be many people who’ve seen every Nicolas Cage movie, especially those made during his years in the straight-to-video doldrums, and it turns out that there’s even one Nicolas Cage movie that the man himself has no intention of ever watching.
Having become a near-ubiquitous presence over the last four decades, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t seen at least a couple of Cage flicks. On the other hand, you’d have to look a lot harder to find a soul brave enough to see them all, because so many of them are utter shite.
From Leaving Las Vegas, The Rock, Raising Arizona, and Peggy Sue Got Married to Pig, Dream Scenario, Mandy, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the prolific performer has pulled his weight in many a classic, the odd Academy Award winner, and more than a few cult favourites.
The downside is that if you want the full Cage experience, you’ll also have to put yourself in the unfortunate position of sticking with Left Behind, Grand Isle, Bangkok Dangerous, Season of the Witch, and Tokarev until the bitter end, which isn’t a fate that anyone deserves to suffer.
Obviously, the star has defended his extended sabbatical into tedious genre fare, and he does have a point: the Oscar-winning member of the Coppola dynasty has held his hands up and confessed that most of those movies were made for financial reasons, but he’s not wrong when he said that he didn’t phone in his performances in any of them, which isn’t always a good thing.
That makes it somewhat ironic that the one he’s vowed to avoid watching for the rest of his life was one of the better ones he’s made in the last 15 years or so, and it played an important role in the renaissance he currently finds himself in. According to Cage, you’ve got a much better chance of making him revisit Ghost Rider 100 times in a row than having him watch The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent once.
“I’m never going to see that movie,” he declared. “I’m told it’s a good movie. My manager, Mike Nilon, who is also a producer, looked at it. He was very happy. I’m told the audience loved the movie, but it’s just too much of a whacked-out trip for me to go to a movie theatre and watch me play Tom Gormican’s highly neurotic, anxiety-ridden version of me. I won’t see it.”
He’s missing out because Cage’s performance, both as Nick Cage and his digitally de-aged alter ego, Nicky Cage, is a thing of beauty. Actors playing themselves can be hit-or-miss, especially with those who aren’t willing to poke fun at themselves, but the self-aware action comedy thrives on its leading man’s ability to recognise, subvert, and mock both his and the movie’s metatextuality.
Unsurprisingly, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent fit him like a glove, but Nicolas Cage watching Nicolas Cage play a character called Nick Cage is a step too far for Nicolas Cage, which sounds like it could be a subplot for a sequel, and director Gormican even had a genius idea for it, too.
