Tag Archives: #gold

Gold (2022)

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Release: Friday, March 11, 2022 (limited) 

👀 Hulu

Written by: Anthony Hayes; Polly Smyth

Directed by: Anthony Hayes

Starring: Zac Efron; Anthony Hayes; Susie Porter

Distributor: Screen Media Films

 

 

 

****/*****

Over the last few years, former Disney Channel star Zac Efron has been making some interesting moves, turning away from the eye candy roles that came to define him as a younger actor and embracing heavier dramatic material. His turn as Ted Bundy in 2019’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile proved he was eager to move beyond typecast and I’m not sure if there’s a more direct route to doing so than by playing a serial killer.

Indeed, if it were only the atrocity of Bundy that Efron had tapped into, maybe it would be easy to dismiss as gimmick — a desperate act of overcompensation. But when he commits himself in the way that he does in Gold, a viciously realistic survival thriller from Aussie director, writer and co-star Anthony Hayes, suddenly the days of High School Musical seem like prehistory. This is Efron operating on another level, evoking desperation and greed to stomach-churning effect. Sure, he benefits from Beth Halsted’s stunning make-up work, but he essentially holds the entire movie on his own and that’s no small feat.

Set sometime in the near future, Gold keeps the audience in the dark as far as the big picture is concerned. The script (by Hayes and his partner Polly Smyth) is as minimalist as the stripped-out coal mine that has become of the world. We’re post-apocalypse but we don’t know what caused humanity to be brought to its knees. A man named Virgil (Efron) train-hops his way to a remote outpost in the sprawling desert. Here he’s to catch a ride with another man, Keith (played in a gruff and world-weary manner by Hayes) who will take him to a mysterious place called The Compound, where Virgil hopes to find some stability doing hard labor. (Yeah, this movie is grim — imagine that for a happy ending.)

As the pair make their way in Keith’s weather-beaten truck we get drip fed little bits of their past and their musings on what is happening elsewhere. Not much is revealed, just enough to get an idea Virgil may be carrying around a little too much sensitivity in this place, while Keith appears/sounds the genuine article as a frontiersman. But the proof will be in the suffering when the pair make the incredible discovery of a massive chunk of gold and hatch a plan to extract it. Too big to move by hand or even truck, Virgil insists he stay behind to guard their riches while Keith will head back to get an excavator, a round trip of about five days or so.

Fine if you’re staying at the Ritz-Carlton, not so much if you’re hitching yourself to a lone, sun-parched tree with minimal food and water supplies. At least he has a satellite phone? High winds, reptiles, wild dogs — these are some of the amenities Virgil gets to enjoy as he goes full Aron Ralston in 127 even more desperate hours, squaring off against dehydration, starvation and paranoia as each passing sun and moon adds to the feeling of abandonment. It’s a startlingly authentic portrayal from Efron, who is a strong reason to see yet another movie titled Gold.

Though filmed in the Flinders Ranges of the Outback the movie is shot tightly, with a raw intimacy that never allows you to get comfortable. As director, Hayes uses the crunch of COVID-era restrictions to fashion a harrowing tale of obsession and survival where space is put to use in ways both creative and cruel. As screenwriter, his judgment of time elapsing is one of the most powerful driving forces, with a variety of cuts to Efron’s façade depicting a man utterly wasting away in the elements.

Gold is undeniably a familiar yarn, one where a carefully curated song at the end spells out the lesson learned in big letters. When a scavenger (played with sinister intent by Susie Porter) appears on the scene, the haggard signposting of where things go are as obvious as the glinting jewel. Still, the heaviness with which certain developments land is not to be discounted. Dismissing the saga as overly familiar does a disservice to the intensity and authenticity of the experience.

Gnarly and visceral, Gold is entertaining in that morbidly fascinating way movies about the corruptive power of wealth often are — it’s not full-blown Shadenfreude, but at some point sympathy drops away and yields to pity. Even with sparse personality, the technical aspects make everything feel real and hard to look away from, even when you want to.

5G coverage, my ass

Moral of the Story: 127 Hours meets The Treasure of the Sierra Madre meets The Martian (the latter, in a more painfully specific way I guess). Harsh and pretty conservative in terms of action, Gold won’t be everyone’s idea of a fun Saturday night but for those looking for proof of Zac Efron’s talent, look no further. 

Rated: R

Running Time: 91 mins.

Quoted: “I can handle it.”

All content originally published and the reproduction elsewhere without the expressed written consent of the blog owner is prohibited. 

Photo credits: http://www.impawards.com; http://www.screendaily.com 

Uncharted

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Release: Friday, February 18, 2022

👀 Netflix

Written by: Rafe Judkins; Art Marcum; Matt Holloway

Directed by: Ruben Fleischer

Starring: Tom Holland; Mark Wahlberg; Antonio Banderas; Sophia Ali; Tati Gabrielle; Rudy Pankow

Distributor: Sony Pictures

 

 

**/*****

For the uninitiated, Uncharted is a popular series of video games that debuted on Playstation 3 in 2007. Hate to say it, but the 2022 movie adaptation starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg will not be considered the standard-setter its source has become heralded as. Hardly anything in the movie qualifies as bad, but just as much is actually worth remembering in the end.

Relying on good, old-fashioned movie star power to provide some sense of personality, Uncharted follows adventure-seeker Nathan Drake (Holland) on a quest to find out what happened to his older brother Sam (Rudy Pankow) who disappeared from his life when circumstances forced him to leave the Boston orphanage they grew up in. Whip ahead 15 years and Nate, now a bartender in New York who pickpockets patrons for minor thrills, is given an opportunity to put his specific skillset to better use.

A sleepwalking Mark Wahlberg plays fortune hunter Vincent ‘Sully’ Sullivan. More loyal to money than to people, Sully is as basic a character as they come and the portrayal does not exactly go above and beyond. He is after a massive treasure chest stashed away by famed explorer Ferdinand Magellan. He thinks he knows its general location but needs Nate’s help in pinpointing it. More valuable to Nate however is what Sully may know about his brother’s fate.

So they reluctantly team up, a career opportunist and a naive newbie working together about as well as oil and water as they assemble various valuable pieces (a key, a diary, a map) in an increasingly complex puzzle. However some of the pieces require further assistance to access, and so an already awkward partnership is further destabilized when they rendezvous with Sully’s contact Chloe Frazer (Sophia Ali) in Barcelona. Mysterious and shifty, she’s a veteran of Sully’s game of deception and will do whatever it takes to ensure history will not repeat itself. 

In the villainous camp we have Santiago Moncado (Antonio Banderas) who, as the last living descendant, is desperate to restore the Moncado name in view of the historical embarrassment of his ancestors having lost the treasure. Banderas brings some menace but ultimately he’s outshined by the striking-looking Tati Gabrielle, who dials up the intensity as Jo Braddock, a ruthless mercenary who has her own designs on Moncado’s long lost loot.

All these competing interests theoretically make the movie more involving, especially when you have a dysfunctional group of good guys to keep an eye on as well. Because everything is so safe and routine the competition is not as exciting as it should be. However Uncharted comes more to life in the stunt work, which is kinetic, often inventive and infused with a decent amount of comedy. Peter Parker’s Cirque du Soleil moment at an art auction and the grand finale where everything is literally up in the air are memorable passages in a voyage that’s content to skim the surface of its themes and ride almost entirely on the likability factor of its in-demand leading man.

There’s no ‘I’ in TEAM. But there is a ‘ME’ if you move the letters around

Moral of the Story: Uncharted is an undemanding escape in which the compass always points to the wreckage of superior adventure films. The title is a misnomer for a film that is the very definition of average, one that shows the challenges of translating active participation of gameplay into the passive entertainment of movie watching. It’s entirely inoffensive and easy to get along with but if you’re looking for a more robust adventure, check out a younger, pre-Spidey Tom Holland in 2016’s underrated gem The Lost City of Z. 

Rated: PG-13

Running Time: 116 mins.

Quoted: “Nuns. Why is it always nuns?” 

All content originally published and the reproduction elsewhere without the expressed written consent of the blog owner is prohibited.

Photo credits: http://www.impawards.com; http://www.imdb.com

Gold (2016)

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gold-movie-poster

Release: Friday, December 30, 2016 (limited)

👀 Theater

Written by: Patrick Massett; John Zinman

Directed by: Stephen Gaghan

Starring: Matthew McConaughey; Édgar Ramírez; Bryce Dallas Howard; Corey Stoll; Toby Kebbell; Craig T. Nelson; Bruce Greenwood; Stacy Keach

Distributor: TWC-Dimension

 

**/*****

The prospect of finding cinematic gold in a true story directed by “the guy who wrote Traffic” and starring the winsome (and also Oscar-winning) Matthew McConaughey seems a sure thing. Unfortunately their first team-up proves how elusive success really can be.

Stephen Gaghan loosely bases his film on a 1993 gold mining scandal involving the Canadian Bre-X Minerals company who claimed to have discovered a massive gold deposit in the Indonesian rainforest, the liquidated value of which was thought to be nearly immeasurable. What was found was later proven to be false gold of course, and the company subsequently found guilty of defrauding investors out of billions.

Gold changes names and dates to avoid legal trouble but it also largely avoids excavating any entertainment value out of the situation. While its star fervently takes to the task of portraying another wily, good-natured yet deeply flawed opportunist, this meandering mess of a story doesn’t do nearly enough to match the conviction of its lead character and the spirited performance of the actor.

McConaughey, channeling some of his Wolf of Wall Street charisma, plays Kenny Wells, an earnest gold prospector who finds himself way out of his depth when he steps out of the Borneo jungle and onto Wall Street, where he takes his father (Craig T. Nelson)’s company public after allegedly tapping into “the largest gold mine of the decade.” All throughout a balding, comically uglified McConaughey insists it is not about money, but rather the joy of discovering that very thing his father and his father’s father dedicated their lives to, the very resource to which Kenny and his geologist buddy Michael Acosta (Édgar Ramírez) dedicated a fun/malaria-infested summer at the equator.

The film is divided into two major slogs. The first slog is spent in the jungle as Kenny and Michael battle bad weather, brutal labor conditions (which lead to labor strikes), and increasing pressure from the outside to deliver. The second follows in the aftermath of the discovery and half-heartedly addresses the various political, social and personal implications and complications of accumulating wealth and notoriety. It also introduces a thoroughly forgettable subplot reminding us for the umpteenth time of how brutal and cold Wall Street can be.

I can’t help but feel Gaghan is operating in the wrong capacity as a director. Though the man has several directing credits on his résumé, there’s a reason most people only ever associate his name with Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning film about heroin distribution. Traffic‘s screenplay was nothing short of brilliant. And he’s probably been told that ad nauseam so I’m a little surprised he chose not to take a similar approach to a story dealing ostensibly with the way gold fever — and McConaughey gets it pretty badly — can evolve into an addiction. How it can change, corrupt, maybe even damn a person. Gold didn’t need to be so serious, but it desperately lacks weight and importance.

Gaghan’s fourth directorial outing isn’t a poorly made product, per se, but it’s painfully obvious and worse, uninvolving. The McConaughey faithful head into theaters hoping to find gold but end up leaving with nothing more than a lump of bauxite in their hands.

Flex hard

Moral of the Story: Disappointing David O’Russell knock-off strands another great Matthew McConaughey performance in a sea of mediocre drama. Very little about this predictable, tired trajectory has the impact the writers and the director were no doubt looking for. For what it’s worth, McConaughey and Ramírez make for a fairly entertaining duo. 

Rated: R

Running Time: 120 mins.

Quoted: “We got a goldmine . . . ? We got a goldmine!!!” 

All content originally published and the reproduction elsewhere without the expressed written consent of the blog owner is prohibited.

Photo credits: http://www.impawards.com; http://www.imdb.com