Friday, January 27, 2017

Movie Review: Gold

One has to admire Matthew McConaughey and the fact that for two movies he has made recently, he lost and gained a great deal of weight. The first was for "Dallas Buyers Club" where he won the academy award for best actor and now for the movie "Gold" he gained a great deal of weight. For the movie "Dallas Buyers Club" he had to lose a life-threatening amount of weight to play a character who is dying of AIDS, as Tom Hanks did for "Philadelphia" in 1993. But for this movie, it didn't seem to be necessary to gain so much weight for this role, at least 40 pounds. When you remember as an actor, that "it's only a movie", then you should realize that no movie or movie award is ever going to be worth your health.

As for the film, I was expecting something stronger, especially from what I have been hearing about this movie before I saw it. Overall this film was just a good story that is loosely based on the Bre-x Gold Mining scandal in Indonesia in 1993 that involved a massive fraud. What this movie shows is how extremely difficult the Gold mining business is because the risks both financially and physically are so extreme. I had to admire McConaughey's character, Kenny Wells and his constant living on the edge of financial ruin and then the extreme risks he took investing in an area within the hot jungles of Indonesia. The risks of finding Gold anywhere in the world are obvious, but then you also run the risk of any country deciding to Nationalize your Gold Mine and that would mean a 100% total loss of all the money spent to find the Gold up to that point.

Bryce Dallas Howard plays Kenny Well's wife in this movie but she seems miscast because of McConaughey's run down and overweight appearance in this story. The actor Edgar Ramírez plays the friend of Kenny Wells who originally finds the Gold in Indonesia. The acting in Gold is solid throughout and there are some twists and turns at the end of this story that make the film more interesting overall, but not enough to give Gold any more than a marginal recommendation.

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