June 18, 2022 8:57 am
Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal are a winning team in The talent of Mr. C, a romantic and friendly comedy, good-natured and full of action. Pascal is particularly adorable in the role of Spanish billionaire Javier “Javi” Gutierrez, who adores his idol Nicolas Cage so much that he offers him a million dollars to attend his birthday party at his fabulous seaside villa in Mallorca. To complicate matters, there is the possibility that Gutierrez is also the head of a mafia family whose main activity is international arms trafficking.
The key comic idea is that Nicolas Cage plays himself as actor Nick Cage, comically self-centered (with an extra k to fit Nic Cage’s figure to the screen, the writers said), and engaged in a fight to the rescue of a failing career. This difficult task is not only due to the need to share his “skills as a neo-shamanic actor” with the world. Nor is it just to appease his fictional and fierce fictional alter ego Nicky, dressed in leather and flowing hair, a monstrous computer graphic version of the young Cage from the era of Wild Heartwho wants to maintain the actor’s old and fabulous level of stardom and punches his brutal pep talk by shouting, “You are Nick FUCKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN ‘YAHOW Cage!”.
Among other reasons is the fact that the protagonist, living beyond his means, is seriously indebted.
(We know the real Cage actually has terrible debts, as he squandered several fortunes in his life to buy fifteen lavish homes, among other things, including two European castles and three private islands; more than fifty incredibly expensive cars, including including the Lamborghini of the late Shah of Persia; four yachts; a rare Tyrannosaurus bataar dinosaur skull; and a huge pyramid-shaped headstone nearly three meters high in the oldest cemetery in New Orleans, where the actor intends to be buried. To be honest, the real Nicolas Cage is such an unlikely character that a biographically accurate film would be more far-fetched than this insane, comedic adventure film).
There are also the family problems of his ex-wife on a warpath, Olivia (Sharon Horgan), and the daughter with whom he no longer has contact, Addy (Lily Sheen, who is actually the product of a Hollywood consanguinity, as a daughter by Kate Beckinsale and Michael Sheen). The two consider Nick Cage a loser and an embarrassment for all these reasons.
Adding to this humiliating mix is the loss of an important career-saving role, for which he auditioned in the Chateau Marmont parking lot for bewildered director David Gordon Green (who plays himself). Nick Cage is so ready to announce to his (Neil Patrick Harris) manipulative agent that he is going to: a) give up acting forever, and b) ready to accept the offer of a billionaire birthday party.
The film has a plot that gets weirder every minute
But the unexpected bond created between Nick and Javi in Mallorca changes things. Nick ends up collaborating on Javi’s screenplay – obviously designed to bring out, in the lead role, Nicolas Cage himself – among other things by getting acid and exploring their innermost feelings, in the scenes that make up the funny second act of the film. . Their therapeutic idyll is complicated by the intrusiveness of two CIA agents (played by Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz) who investigate the kidnapping of the Catalan president’s daughter by Gutierrez’s henchmen in order to influence the election and neutralize the enemy candidate. of crime. Nick is forced to rehearse for a spy-actor role to frame his friend. Eventually, he must face a series of scenarios reminiscent of his various action films to save Javi, his family and himself from disaster.
The film has a plot that gets weirder every minute, which doesn’t really matter because the fun is seeing Nicolas Cage stage a pleasantly absurd version of his life as a star, assisted by Pedro Pascal as his die-hard admirer. The real Cage has long since fallen into the multifaceted character described by the book Age of Cage [una biografia di Nicolas Cage scritta da Keith Phipps, ndr]: that of the movie star, crazy and arrogant, fed by young fans on social networks, which generated a million meme in his honour. And this film is a gift for them. But Nick’s character within the film is far more edgy and wary of the strangeness of his own fame, and his nasal voice falters uncertainly when he has to thank people for talking about the important and lasting effect he has left on theirs. life his 1994 comedy Dear, unbearable Tessor who want to hug him and take a selfie with him for his amazing work on the film The Croods 2: a new era.
Well-balanced comic twist
He is amazed at the shrine that Javi dedicated to Nicolas Cage, which occupies an entire secret room, and is particularly impressed by the “deeply disturbing” and life-size replica of Cage as the killer madman Castor Troy in the film. Face/Off (1997) by John Woo, with outstretched arms and two gold-plated pistols in his hands, supposedly the originals of the film. One of the disturbing aspects of it is that Nick wants his gold guns back.
Cage’s interpretation in The talent of Mr. C, playing a struggling Nick Cage is a well-balanced comic twist, but Cage has always been good at comedies. His legendary belief as a crazy actor, which led him to those fascinating but demented “brave choices” that drove fellow actors crazy early in his career, before people got used to Cage’s philosophy, here bears fruit. of him. The demands of comedy make it clear that, despite his over-the-top panache, Cage has become more precise in achieving the effects he’s been acknowledging lately, now that his name is synonymous with excess. He knows how to bring a touch of maturity to a joke and how to use his methodical madness in absurd scenes. Just watch him give his best in the lysergic trip sequence, in which Nick and Javi, LSD junkies convinced they are being chased by undercover agents, try to scale a wall and then play a funereal farewell scene when Javi isn’t. he takes it longer, with Nick howling and banging on the wall in anguish.
According to director Tom Gormican, Cage himself defines this scene as an example of their ability to capture “the real Cage” on film.
The script was written by Gormican and Kevin Etten, who didn’t have a back-up plan if Cage refused. Gormican, a devotee of Cage since he first saw his “hyperbolic” interpretation in the Coen brothers’ comedy Arizona junior in 1987, he basically made a film about the inordinate joys of being a movie fan: “We asked Pedro Pascal to say the things we wanted to say to Nic and then we saw how things went… The whole movie is like an avatar of Kevin’s and my personality: we really like Nicolas Cage. We said to ourselves: ‘Ok, what is the worst scenario that would make us satisfied anyway?’. And we said to ourselves: ‘ae we can have lunch with Nicolas Cage, I think that’s enough. I want to have a salad with Nicolas Cage somewhere in Los Angeles, and if that’s the only thing that happens, it will still be worth the time. ‘”
So if you can’t get into the sweet, messy spirit of a die-hard movie fan, this movie is probably not for you.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)