The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Tom Gormican wrote the script with no assurance Nicolas Cage would play the part; Cage turned it down 3 or 4 times and relented only after Gormican sent him a personal letter. The younger Cage is not a random era either. Co-writer Kevin Etten says the team floated the Con Air or Face/Off version; Cage asked instead for the man he was on the Wogan talk show in 1990, promoting Wild at Heart. That is where the self-mockery stops: Cage pushed back on the script making him a father estranged from his daughter, saying it was nothing like him. The career is fair game, the private life is not. Some references are framing rather than dialogue: Gormican traces the walk into the pool to Leaving Las Vegas, and Cage improvised the bee line from The Wicker Man. Shooting ran through autumn 2020, mostly in Hungary with a stretch near Dubrovnik, and when Gormican caught covid he directed some scenes remotely over an iPad. The worldwide gross fell under the 30 million dollar budget. A good fit if you like tracing each borrowed beat back to its source film. Not for viewers who will find it too tame once the meta jokes give way to an armed kidnap and rescue plot that lands on a family watching Paddington 2.