The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Take 2

Last October I watched Nick Cage's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and it struck a wrong chord with me.  I mean the whole premise that Nick has a teenage daughter and loving wife that he's trying to make work as a family...come on, that's bullshit.  That's not how we think of Cage.  We think of him as this wild and crazy guy who blew through all his money from the 90s and early 2000s and so started doing just a ton of straight-to-Redbox/streaming shit, most of which is shit.  I know because I've watched most of it.  While there are a few decent ones still in the mix like Pig, most of the movies are just lame, cheap action movies and occasionally a horror movie or sci-fi movie or something.

Anyway, afterwards I as usual began thinking what I would do.  And it occurred to me that I could actually lean on a Nick Cage movie.  Not one of the bad ones, but one that isn't widely remembered:  Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men.  In that movie, Cage is a con artist with OCD who meets a girl claiming to be his daughter.  He starts to show her the business, but then it all turns out to be a scam thought up by his partner, Sam Rockwell, to steal all the money Cage had squirreled away.

So my idea is that we start with Cage shooting some crappy action movie and he's doing some crazy shit and being a total douchebag to the director and other actors and whatever.  He walks off the set after someone doesn't get his latte hot enough or some stupid shit like that and drives his Ferrari home really fast or whatever only to find a teenage girl on his doorstep or front gate.

She claims to be his daughter from some woman he knocked up while shooting a movie in Niagara Falls or Atlanta or New Orleans or whatever.  But her mother died of cancer recently; before she did, she confessed that Nick is the girl's father, so the girl came to see him.  He's skeptical, but he lets her come inside since she has nowhere else to go.

Things are tense at first but they start to bond when he takes her to a set and she has an interest in acting and stuff and eventually she even gets to be in a scene.  He helps her to apply to SAG and bullshit like that and then talks about getting her a tutor or going to a real school and stuff.  So Nick is feeling happier now than he has for a while.  He's starting to think maybe he should have done the family thing a long time ago...

But then on the set, some bad guys show up disguised as movie bad guys.  When they kidnap the girl, at first everyone thinks it's part of the movie, but it's not.  They take her away and Nick unsuccessfully chases them.  Later he goes to the cops, but there's a lot he really can't tell them about the girl because he hasn't known her long.

The kidnappers call later and show a video of the girl getting beat up or something non-sexual.  They demand a huge ransom that Nick doesn't actually have or else they'll start mailing pieces to him.  The cops promise they're doing all they can, but Nick decides to take things into his own hands using the skills he learned in movies.

As he starts bumbling around, doing a discount Taken, someone leaks the girl's abduction and so there's a lot of hubbub in the news and on social media and stuff and Nick tearfully says he just wants his daughter back and stuff like that.  But a lot of people are skeptical, thinking it's just a PR stunt to get him back in the limelight after so long.

The kidnappers send a rendezvous with the money--that again Nick doesn't have.  So he plans to double-cross them with fake money under some real money.  He goes to the rendezvous in some public place and waits for the kidnappers to show up and then follows them back to their lair.  In action movie style he kills the bad guys and frees his daughter.  They're tearfully reunited and go on camera and everything.

Months later, everything seems going great and with the PR from the kidnapping, Nick is getting offers for real movies again and they're making a big budget movie of his story.  But then sort of a Gone Girl twist where the girl makes some little slip-up and Nick confronts her and she reveals that the whole thing was just a scam so she could get discovered.  She's not really his daughter and the kidnappers were just people she hired.  They thought they'd get a cut of the ransom, but Nick killing them conveniently solved the problem of them snitching on her.  Of course Nick could go public with the truth, but if he did, he'd look like a fool to everyone and probably lose all those new parts he's being offered.

And so he keeps his mouth shut--for now...

Not a happy ending like them watching Paddington 2, but I think it's a better movie.  More believable anyway.