Movie Reviews

Gold tells the true story of Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey), a gold prospector who followed in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather. But unlike the men in his family that came before him, Kenny doesn’t have luck on his side. He runs the family business into the ground and is down to his last dollars. But then he decides to take one last chance and bets everything he has on a high-stakes mining operation in Indonesia run by geologist Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez). And guess what? They hit the motherlode.

Director Stephan Gaghan (Syriana, Traffic) does his best to keep Gold afloat, and while the cast is right there with him, things never really take off. McConaughey, armed with an impressive receding hairline, is highly believable (but not very likeable) as a pot-bellied, loud-mouth, Trump-ish ogre. He is backed up by a strong supporting cast that includes Bryce Dallas Howard, Stacy Keach, Toby Kebbell and Bruce Greenwood. But none of them are really given a lot to work with.

That’s because the script is lacking. It rushes through the movie’s first – and more interesting – half and then drags its feet through the rest. There was actually one part where the screen goes black and I figured the movie had ended. Which would have been fine because it would have made for a perfectly acceptable ending. But then the next scene starts and we are dragged back in for thirty more minutes.