Film review: All that glitters is not Gold

Matthew McConaughey and Edgar Ramirez star in Stephen Gaghan's gold mining drama.

Matthew McConaughey, left, and Edgar Ramírez in the adventure film Gold. Courtesy The Weinstein Company

Gold

Director: Stephen Gaghan

Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Édgar Ramírez, Bryce Dallas Howard

Two-and-a-half stars

The fact that this movie was rushed into cinemas for a brief, Oscar-qualifying release in LA in December, before going on general release this year, leaves little doubt that the producers were hoping to cash in on Matthew McConaughey’s recent run of Academy Award-nominated films.

These include Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Interstellar (2014) and, most notably, Dallas Buyers Club (2013), for which he won Best Actor at the Oscars, Golden Globes and SAG Awards.

Yet Gold was conspicuously absent when the Academy Awards nominations were announced last month, suggesting it is not quite up to the standard of his previous films.

McConaughey is as reliably on form as ever, swapping the emaciated, pasty cowboy of Dallas Buyers Club for pot-bellied, balding, washed-up gold prospector Kenny Wells.

Down to his last pennies and living rent-free with his long-suffering girlfriend, Kay (Bryce Dallas Howard), Wells has a dream about finding a huge gold mine in the Indonesian jungle.

Teaming up with geologist Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), he sets out to find it. Not only is he clearly ill-suited to hard work, he is boorish, lacking in intelligence and fundamentally unlikeable.

Yet McConaughey makes the character so much larger than life that, we can’t help being – just a little bit – pleased for him when things appear to start going his way.

Of course where gold and potential riches are concerned, nothing is ever simple. Wells soon discovers there are people far more clever, cunning and corrupt than him who sense a chance to make a quick buck. He’s in for a bumpy ride in a classic repeated rise and fall situation, where the only question is whether he will come out on top or at rock bottom.

McConaughey is undoubtedly the film’s biggest strength – but perhaps also its greatest weakness, given it leans so heavily on his grandstanding to cover up deficiencies such as a lack of a strong script and underdeveloped supporting characters.

Acosta, for example, could be fascinating but is so understated compared with Wells that we barely notice him for much of the movie.

Ramirez's award-winning performance as Carlos the Jackal in Carlos, in the 2010 French biopic about the Venezuelan terrorist/revolutionary, showed that he is capable of dominating the screen.

In this case, it is almost as if he was under strict orders to demur to his co-star at all times.

Howard is somewhat wasted, too, in a rather superfluous role. She has a brief spell as a supportive girlfriend, before reappearing later wearing outrageous 1980s-style shoulder pads signifying the couple’s change in fortunes – then before you know their relationship is on the rocks.

It all could have been so much more. The idea – based loosely on a true story – is solid, there are plentiful twists and turns, a great star performance and a talented cast. Director Gaghan seems to have gambled all his chips on a McConaughey Oscar, though, and turned in a film that, though perhaps great on paper, is much less than the sum of its parts. All that glitters is not gold, indeed.