Playing himself, Cage serves the acting fans love him for – but has this strained action comedy spoiled the joke?

Nicolas Cage has officially revealed he’s in on the joke … if “joke” is precisely what it is. But has that spoiled the joke – if that is the correct word? This is a self-aware action comedy whose title is possibly the funniest bit, riffing on Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being as well as possibly Dave Eggers’s memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Producer-star Cage plays “Nick Cage”: Hollywood ledge and national treasure (to quote a relevant movie title) now in a midlife crisis, haunted by CGI-doppelganger visions of his angry younger self, no longer booking the big roles and facing a grim future in which, as his agent (Neil Patrick Harris) puts it, he plays the cool gay uncle in a Duplass brothers film.

Cage is living in a hotel,...