We’ve all made this movie in our heads at some point, but this is so much better than any version you could have dreamt up. Although I love a good Cage-ism, only about a quarter of the comedy was purely referential, and I think that was the key to making this work. Cage and Pascal are an absolutely perfect comedy duo. Could easily see them making another one of these. I haven’t liked a new straight narrative comedy (especially in theaters) like this in a long long time.
Caveat: it unfortunately suffers from some trashy Paul Feig movie qualities (it’s edited by one of his collaborators) which I’m not totally on board with. For instance, during a short drug sequence (the first one that is by accident; trying not to spoil), Cage sort of channels DiCaprio in the Wolf of Wall Street quaalude scene. Part of what makes that scene so brilliant in Wolf (honestly one of Scorsese’s top ten scenes) is the conservative and lucid, but striking, editing. Scorsese and Schoonmaker held back a lot and just let the scene play out. Particularly when it came to sound—the fact that Scorsese didn’t hit the Rolling Stones button during that scene is nothing short of a miracle! Massive Talent goes the opposite direction and comes very close to ruining the comedic value of the whole sequence with its generic score. Luckily the second drug trip is way better edited, and on the whole, the edit allows most jokes the space they need to land. A few edits even made me laugh based solely on the strength of the edits alone (i.e. they weren’t beats that could have been written explicitly into the script). On a scale from Paul Feig to Schoonmaker, I’d say Massive Talent is somewhere in between. I know y’all follow me for my hot takes, so there you go.
Off to buy Captain Corelli’s Mandolin on blu-ray.