Movie Review: Gold: New at Reason

Gold is a movie that seeks to be two things at once: a bushwhacking jungle adventure and a shark-tank finance thriller. It doesn’t fail exactly, or not entirely: the picture looks okay (although Robert Elswit has done better work) and the actors aren’t phoning it in. But the movie does fail to be very interesting, and even Matthew McConaughey in full hyper-overdrive can’t make it so.

The story is “inspired by actual events,” as they say—which in this case means it’s based on a big mining-business scandal that occurred in Canada in the late 1990s and has now been transported across the border to Reno, Nevada, in the late 1980s. McConaughey—fitted out with a real pot belly, a faux balding pate, and an odd prosthetic tooth—plays Kenny Wells, head of a failing family mining company that desperately needs a major score. Kenny hears about a hot young geologist named Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez) who has a new prospecting theory that involves… I dunno, tectonic plates or something (“Ring of Fire,” it’s called). This theory appears to be legit: Acosta recently discovered a large copper lode in Indonesia that has enriched everyone associated with it. Kenny hocks a couple of watches and flies to Borneo to meet this guy. Soon they’re in business together, searching for gold, writes Kurt Loder.

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