Gold (2017)

Gold (2017)

IMDB rating 7.5/10

Director: Stephen Gaghan

Writers: Patrick Massett, John Zinman

Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramírez, Bryce Dallas Howard

R | 2h 1min | Adventure, Drama, Thriller

Story line

An unlikely pair venture to the Indonesian jungle in search of gold

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆

The priciest ore is a bore in Matthew McConaughey misfire

An allegedly true story emerges as a lackluster riff on American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street with a scrappy turn from an overly disguised lead star

There’s not much that glitters in Gold, a lackluster caper that proves that even the priciest ore can bore. Stephen Gaghan’s new film is an admixture of the capitalist nihilism from The Wolf of Wall Street and the cheap-suit true crime of American Hustle. On paper the elements are there, but unfortunately the alchemy fails. This year’s earlier picture War Dogs, already something of a formulaic copy, comes off looking like quite the jewel by comparison.

Matthew McConaughey, whose brief scene in The Wolf of Wall Street is well on its way to being considered iconic, is all over the map as the DIY metal man Kenny Wells. One moment he is slick and appealing, the next he is a shambling shyster. The screenplay lurches between comedy and intrigue, attempting to sell Wells’s love of penetrating the earth for its riches as some sort of misunderstood romantic impulse, when it would be easier to just admit the man wants to be rich.

Wells, who inherits a successful business from his father in the early 1990s, is driven, in Trumpian fashion, to go for big risks. He teams with a down-on-his-luck but brilliant geologist (Edgar Ramírez) and soon the pair have got Indonesian villagers drilling in a valley because they know that’s where their future awaits, malaria be damned.

Back home in Nevada, Wells has a group of salesmen wearing loose ties who hang around the bar all day, ready to make phone calls to easily hoodwinked investors. And there’s also Bryce Dallas Howard, who must win this year’s award for Most Thankless Wife (Girlfriend?) Role of the Year. I honestly can’t remember a damn thing she does in this movie except look worried from time to time.

Well, eventually they hit the motherlode and that means a soaring stock price and interest from New York firms that want to partner in the extraction and movement of what might be the biggest gold strike in decades. McConaughey and Ramírez are very charismatic actors, so these scenes of boardroom bravado are entertaining to a degree. Wells wheels and deals to some groovy soundtrack funk – which was really a breath of fresh air when Steven Soderbergh made Out of Sight in 1998 – but there’s almost a Saturday Night Live-esque parody to these sequences. It isn’t just because McConaughey has extreme male pattern baldness and a rotund middle, but it’s the strangely uninteresting nature of the story that’s being told. We can observe from a distance, but it is extremely difficult to care.

Unlike The Big Short, another movie Gold so very much wants to be like, Gaghan’s script (co-written with Patrick Massett and John Zinman) zooms through the complex business developments that cause such consternation for our main characters. Sure, Indonesia’s Suharto government sending in armed men to “nationalize” the dig is a moment that clicks, but the other negotiation sequences do not have the same resonance.

Naturally this all leads to a third-act twist, and I wouldn’t want to be the one to spoil the movie’s most interesting nugget. It is humorous to point out, however, that this film, born from the repercussions of a great fraud, enters the marketplace as being based on a true story. Cursory research shows that there are only trace elements of what actually happened (the Bre-X case, as it is called). There are parallels to McConaughey’s and Ramírez’s characters, but it is hardly a one-to-one. Did the real Kenny Wells figure accept a golden pickaxe statue as a culmination of a life’s work and give a rapturous speech about the ecstatic qualities of metallurgy? We can only hope so, because that scene’s absurdity is pure gold.

Read full review at The Guardian

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In an adventure drama inspired by true events, Matthew McConaughey and Edgar Ramirez star as business partners whose underdog mining enterprise puts them on the high-finance map.  

Kenny Wells, the indefatigable wildcat prospector at the center of Gold, is a classic American striver — but without the classic American sheen. Potbellied, balding, snaggletoothed, hard-drinking and chain-smoking, he’s played by Matthew McConaughey with a marrow-deep understanding of what makes this desperate dreamer tick. Beyond the actor’s striking physical transformation, his aptly showy turn is the stuff of muck, sweat and dreams, and every instant of it burns true. As robust as the lead performance is, though, the movie around it, directed by Stephen Gaghan from a screenplay by Patrick Massett and John Zinman, too often feels serviceable rather than inspired.

Taking its plotline cues from a 1997 mining scandal involving Canadian outfit Bre-X, the feature relocates the home-company action from Calgary to Reno, aka “the biggest little city in the world” and a setting that perfectly underscores the gambler impulse that defines the main character. It’s also a town where streets are named after Kenny Wells’ family, whose Washoe Mining Corporation has been a leading local business since his grandfather founded it.

A 1981 prologue shows Kenny in the glow of McConaughey-familiar looks and swagger as his father (Craig T. Nelson) places key account responsibilities in his hands. But the main action takes place seven years later, amid a general economic downturn and the bottom of the barrel for Kenny, who has lost his house and is living with longtime girlfriend Kay (Bryce Dallas Howard), a sturdy salt-of-the-earth type. What’s left of Washoe operates out of the bar where she waitresses, and bankers won’t give Kenny the time of day.

Kenny’s can-do spirit is coiled and ready to pounce when, in a whiskey-fueled vision, he remembers geologist Michael Acosta (Ramirez), the man behind a landmark copper strike in Indonesia and proponent of a theory about untapped reserves of gold. One trip to the pawn shop and Kenny is in Southeast Asia, a penniless spieler who convinces the inscrutable Acosta to partner with him because he’s one of the “make-it-happen motherf—ers.”

What unfolds amid the stateside fundraising and jungle excavation is a double romance: There’s Kenny’s love for Kay and, more to the story’s point, his love and admiration for Acosta. Neither strand has the impact it should, but Howard makes more of an impression. Ramirez mostly appears uncomfortable as the chalk to Kenny’s cheese. Impeccable even in tropical heat, Acosta is a man of few words who, in some of the screenplay’s best exchanges, coolly shoots down Kenny’s stabs at sentimentality.

But a certain type of sentimental male bond is at the core of Gold as much as the romance of the search for the precious metal. After their search pays off, the modern-day Mutt and Jeff are a more or less united force — able to resist, in different ways and to varying degrees, the big-business allurements of a New York investment banker (Corey Stoll) and a gazillionaire competitor (Bruce Greenwood). Kenny sees no reason to repel the interest of an aggressively flirtatious finance hotshot (Rachael Taylor), while on home turf, he’s in the doghouse with Kay and back in the good graces of the banker (Stacy Keach) whose lackeys once turned him away.

Heightening the disconnect between Manhattan and Reno, designers Maria Djurkovic and Danny Glicker give us Kenny enjoying the luxury of his Waldorf suite in his tighty whities, and Kay facing dismissive glances when she strides into a business soiree in a garish metallic dress. Among the business-black conformity of high-powered Gotham, all that glitters isn’t gold.

The screenplay by TV vets Massett and Zinman (Friday Night Lights), whose only previous produced feature is Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, has an assured grasp of mining and finance lingo. And McConaughey excels at drawing unexpected music from his lines. But the movie leans too much on his voiceover, giving the narrative a cobbled-together feel rather than a full-throttle rush. With the accomplished cinematographer Robert Elswit at the lens and a smart, percussive score by Daniel Pemberton, that reliance on literal explanation feels like second-guessing.

Another narrative framing device, a series of flash-forwards to an interview between Kenny and an unidentified questioner (Toby Kebbell), whose role is revealed along with the story’s main twist, is more effective than the v.o. narration, though it too pulls the viewer out of the drama.

Gaghan, working with a far more accessible screenplay than his own for Syriana, delivers some strong individual scenes and judiciously employs split screens to excellent effect, uniting the unlikely partners when they’re working on separate continents. He and Elswit capture the essence of the movie’s disparate locations. The Indonesia sequences, filmed in Thailand under reportedly treacherous physical conditions, convey the steamy temperatures as well as the emerald lushness of the setting.

Whether in the booth of a dingy bar or on a jungle river, Kenny Wells approaches life with a headlong fervor that makes him suspect. But he’s no flimflam man; he’s a believer. McConaughey has said that his father was an inspiration for his performance, which ranks among his best. The actor’s intensity never flags. What’s missing from this story of struggle and glory and the need to believe is a fever to match his.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter

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 Matthew McConaughey Mines Profane Capitalism in ‘Gold’

Kenny Wells, the feckless owner of a Nevada mining company, is the latest entry in the Matthew McConaughey gallery of charming rogues. Swaybacked and paunchy, with a thinning dome and an appetite for Winstons and Seagram’s that would keep both brands in business if the rest of the world went cold turkey, Kenny doesn’t quite have the wolfish charisma or the mystical intensity of some of Mr.McConaughey’s other recent characters. But like them — like Mick Haller in “The Lincoln Lawyer,” Ron Woodroof in “Dallas Buyers Club” and that guy in those car commercials — he is fun to watch and hard not to root for.

“Gold,” which chronicles a few of Kenny’s rises and falls in the 1980s, describes itself as “inspired by actual events,” but inspiration is precisely what the film, directed by Stephen Gaghan from a script by Patrick Massett and John Zinman, seems to lack. Mr. McConaughey is a ball of profane, entrepreneurial energy bouncing around in a vacuum. The story swings from the Nevada desert to the Indonesian rain forest to Wall Street boardrooms, and the screen bristles with signifiers of capitalist activity: meetings, phone calls, stock tickers. But the movie isn’t really doing any work. It’s just looking busy.

The film is well cast: You can’t really go wrong with Bill Camp, Corey Stoll, Stacy Keach and Bruce Greenwood. It’s beautifully shot (you can’t go wrong with Robert Elswit, either). There is a pleasingly sleazy, swaggering, brown-tinted ’80s vibe. And there are flickering reminders of other ambitious, money-chasing mock epics, as if the filmmakers were hoping an algorithm would deposit “Gold” in the queues of viewers who liked “American Hustle,” “The Big Short” and Mr. Gaghan’s own “Syriana.”

With this material, he could have gone in any number of interesting directions, which may have been part of the problem. “Gold” could have been a biting satire of greed and folly, a neo-Conradian tale of Western misadventure in Asia, a rousing fable of underdog triumph or a caper comedy. It tries, in its frantic, clumsy fashion, to be all of those things, and comes close enough to succeeding to qualify as an honorable failure.

What holds your attention is the question of whether that description fits Kenny as well. He could just as well be the opposite — a dishonorable success. He is far from a subtle guy, but Mr. McConaughey is a sly enough actor to make us wonder whether we’re in the company of a fool or a con artist and to make us question whether there’s really a difference. His wild, abrasive and improbably delicate performance is what makes “Gold” watchable, even if the rest of the movie doesn’t supply sufficient reason to keep watching.

Read full review at New york times

Movie Rating ★★✩✩   

 Lackluster ‘Gold’ centers on a showboat-y performance    

The experience of gold is hard to put into words, according to a character in a new film by that name: “The taste of it on your tongue, the feel of it on your fingers — it’s like a drug. It’s electric,” says Mike Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), a geologist who, with his prospecting partner, Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey), has just announced the discovery of a mother lode of the precious metal in a remote Indonesian jungle.

The experience of “Gold” — the movie — is not quite so ineffable. Loosely based on the real-life exploits of David Walsh, a Calgary businessman who claimed, in the 1990s, to have found a gold mine potentially worth several billion dollars, the film is decidedly unelectric. Despite its apparent aspirations to be something more than a financial story with a twist — an admittedly good one — “Gold” feels, for much of its two hours, less like a great buzz than an overlong profile in Business Insider.

The man at the center of this portrait is Kenny, played by a scenery chomping McConaughey, with a chrome dome and a frequently flashed beer belly that seem less organic to the character than like window dressing calculated to showcase the actor’s willingness to tone down his good looks, as he did in his Oscar-winning turn as an AIDS patient in “Dallas Buyers Club.” But a performance — even one as showboat-y as this — does not a movie make. The plot of “Gold” drags inexcusably, irredeemably even, up to and beyond the point at which the story pivots. (Viewers are strongly cautioned against googling Walsh’s story if they aren’t already familiar with it. The twist to this tale of pluck and determination lends the film its only genuine interest, even if it feels like it comes too late and delivers too little.)

 Unfortunately, “Gold” never rises above a character study, albeit one centered on a Technicolor personality. One scene, featured in the trailer, shows Kenny entering a cage to stroke a pet tiger, simply to curry favor with an Indonesian mining official. It’s a mildly entertaining moment, but feels like it was dreamed up to make the story more interesting.

That’s odd. The source material is rich enough, but Massett and Zinman’s script renders it in a manner that all too often jerks us out of the moment. McConaughey narrates the action as Kenny, with several scenes interrupted by flash-forwards to an interview with an unidentified individual (Timothy Simons of “Veep”). Once his identity and purpose is revealed late in the film, his presence makes sense, but these scenes add neither context nor suspense, and disrupt the film’s momentum at the most inopportune times, robbing the narrative of power.

The most ironic thing about “Gold” is this: For all its efforts, the movie seems to know it’s sitting on a gold mine of a backstory, but it just can’t figure out how to get the stuff out of the ground.

Read full review at Washington post

Movie Rating ★★✬☆☆  

 ‘Gold’ mines all McConaughey has to offer in one of his wildest roles  

A protruding beer-belly, snaggly teeth, bloodshot eyes staring out of a sweaty, unshaven face, and on top of it all a comb-over that’s downright pathetic — honey, Matthew McConaughey looks a fright in “Gold.” With other actors, this sort of body modification in the name of art is a high, holy duty. With McConaughey, it’s what he does for kicks.

That wild-card charisma keeps shining through, though, and you watch Kenny Wells, the roistering gold-prospecting anti-hero of “Gold,” with something between awe and alarm, just like the other characters in Stephen Gaghan’s scattershot drama

Per the opening credits, “Gold” is “inspired by a true story,” which gives the filmmakers (and their lawyers) a lot more wiggle room than “based on a true story.” The real mining company was in Canada and called Bre-X; the scandal surrounding its Indonesian gold strike (and assorted skullduggery by members of the ruling Suharto clan, entertainingly sketched in the film) roiled the Canadian stock market in 1993. Ramirez’s character appears to be a fusion of two key players in the Bre-X affair, and McConaughey’s Kenny Wells is based on CEO David Walsh, who may or may not have been in on the various levels of chicanery that did or didn’t go on.

The movie’s an easy, engaging watch, even if it’s literally all over the map. Gaghan is best known as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Traffic” (2000) and he wrote and directed the fiendishly smart “Syriana”(2005) — “Gold” is the first time he hasn’t scripted (or been credited with scripting) a movie he has directed. It shows: The dialogue is funny but awfully glib, and matters aren’t helped when characters point out the hokiness of the very lines they’re saying. In general, the movie needs a tighter hand on the reins. But maybe that’s impossible when you have a star so deeply invested in going buck wild.

Read full review at Boston Globe

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY CAN'T QUITE MAKE 'GOLD' GLITTER

Anyone who thought Matthew McConaughey stole Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street with his high-wired stockbroker act—strutting and whistling and telling Leonardo DiCaprio’s novice to “fuck the clients”—will get a kick or two from Gold.

McConaughey clearly relishes playing flimflam visionaries; he’s negotiated the ups and downs of his Hollywood career with similar back-against-the-wall brinkmanship. Such crackpot wheeler-dealers and bum dreamers are, after a fashion, actors themselves—spielers pulling their inspirational hokum from thin air, hoping for a comeback. Kenny is another one of these “make-it-happen motherfuckers,” as his geologist business-partner Michael Acosta (Édgar Ramírez) puts it. Pawning Kay’s watch to pay for a flight to Indonesia, Kenny is soon digging in the jungle, fighting off malaria, and before you can utter the words “mining-production montage,” he’s struck gold. “A raccoon,” another character says, “who’s gotten his hands on the Hope Diamond.”

If a single performance could make a film, Gold would be, well, solid. McConaughey whoops and hollers and canters, delivering gimlet-eyed eulogies to the precious metal that has long bewitched him, but the film doesn’t hold half the heat of his obsession.

Gaghan, whose first feature, before this, was Syriana, his nebulously confusing CIA thriller from 2005, crowds his rags-to-riches-to-rags plot with voice-overs, flash-forwards, hot tubs and champagne, all set to nifty 1980s tracks from the Pixies, New Order and Joy Division. But a couple of final-reel twists stop the roller coaster dead in its tracks, and his direction never achieves the caffeinated rush or giddiness of a Scorsese, say, or even a David O. Russell. Gold needed a showman behind the camera, as well as in front of it.

Read full Review at Newsweek