Gold

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Kenny Wells (Matthew McConaughey) is a businessman who is down on his luck. One day, everything seems to change when he and archaeologist Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez) stumble across a landmine. I was interested in the movie Gold from the trailer. After seeing the movie, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. The whole movie feels sort of like a Wolf of Wall Street clone. The structure to the movie is incredibly sloppy. A scene will pop up out of nowhere, and it’s just being thrown into the movie way too early. The best example I can think of is that halfway through the movie, it cuts to a scene with Wells being interrogated by an FBI agent (Toby Kebbell). This scene just felt out of nowhere, and I actually wondered if I missed something, or if an important scene was cut out of the movie. No. The FBI agent is officially introduced about a half hour later in the movie. They throw in a ton of fade-to-black segues near the end of the movie, creating tons of unnecessary fakeouts. The pacing is teeth-grindingly slow. This is a 2-hour movie, but it felt way longer.  The acting itself is good, for the most part. Matthew McConaughey brings his A-game, proving to be the movie’s main bright spot. Bryce Dallas Howard plays the girlfriend character, and she does a good job herself. The same can also be said of the performances by Edgar Ramirez and Corey Stoll (playing a Wall Street guy). The problems I have with this aren’t huge. It took me a while to warm up to the chemistry between McConaughey and Howard. The one performer who I really didn’t care for in this movie was Bruce Greenwood. I like Bruce Greenwood. He’s usually a pretty capable actor. Here, I never bought into his fake accent. Overall, Gold has a talented cast giving solid performances to a movie that is beneath them, as well as good ideas that should have been executed far better than they ultimately were.

4 / 10