Movie Review: 'Gold'
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Not much glitters in Gold.
That's because the adventure drama connects the dots but fails to make a real connection with us.
Matthew McConaughey – sporting a balding pate, a pot belly, and crooked teeth -- stars as Kenny Wells, a struggling prospector who now operates his business out of a bar in Reno while his girlfriend, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, supports them by working a number of jobs.
Wells knows he'll eventually have to make his own luck.
So he takes the last of the capital in the family's mining business in Nevada and heads deep in the uncharted jungles of Indonesia in search of a gold strike.
Accompanying him as a partner is crafty geologist Richard Acosta, played by Edgar Ramirez.
They find nothing and are about to call it quits when suddenly they find something and strike it rich.
Of course, as soon as word of Wells' newfound wealth gets out, everybody wants a piece of him. So Wells has got to hold onto what he now has for dear life.
Director Stephen Gaghan (Syriana, Abandon) works from a screenplay by Patrick Massett and John Zinman that is an exploration of greed and trust and betrayal as well as success and failure.
It's based in part on the Bre-X mining scandal of the 1990s. The film it recalls on the surface is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but it lacks the psychological fascination and compelling drama that that classic generates.
And the characters are nowhere near as interesting and engaging as they need to be if we're to emotionally invest in this remote look at the corrupting effects of capitalism.
As for the film's major twist (which anyone who knows the history will see coming), it has minimal impact for reasons that cannot be discussed here in Spoiler Alley.
There's nothing wrong with uglied-up McConaughey's performance technically. It's just that it doesn't jump off the screen and lodge in the memory with the same vividness as, say, his single scene in Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street. To some degree, that's an unfair comparison because his Gold standard is a lead role and the other a virtual cameo. Still, it is a commentary on Gold's retiring nature, its lack of intensity.
This certainly doesn't undermine Oscar winner McConaghey's McConaissance, as the second act of the A-lister's comeback career has been dubbed, but it does stall it for a bit.
So we'll strike 2 stars out of 4 for Gold, a lackluster drama that takes home neither silver not bronze. This particular ore is kind of a bore.
