Gold

Do you enjoy watching men get excited about making lots of money? Then have I got a movie for you! Come on down to Gold! If you kinda liked The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street but found them a bit too pretentious with their “satire” and their “relevance,” then Gold is just the film for you. Literal handfuls of gold are meant as, yes, handfuls of gold. There’s nothing fancypants here… just underpants, like in a scene with a potbellied Matthew McConaughey prancing around in tighty-whities. Fun for the whole family!

Well, maybe don’t bring the kids to Gold: They’ll be bored with all the three-piece high-finance shenanigans, and there’s tons of naughty language flying around. This ain’t a terrible excuse for entertainment for the grown-ups; it’s just very, very familiar. Men and money, the struggle and the hustle. Trying to sleep with new women when the ones who stuck by ’em when they were poor are no longer stimulating enough. Thinking they did it all on their own and pushing away the people who supported them – or who actually did all the work – and got none of the kudos. (If that story isn’t familiar enough, consider going to see the same basic story in The Founder, with a far superior telling of it.)

Gold represents a bunch of paradigms that desperately require a shift, not just in Hollywood but in the real world, which are jumbled up together here because this is “inspired by true events.” Gold is based on a 1990s situation involving Canadian company Bre-X Minerals, but if you don’t already know about that, don’t spoil the movie for yourself by Googling it. Suffice to say that reality was altered enough by screenwriters Patrick Massett and John Zinman so that they could have altered it a little more and not been quite so cliche about it all.

The Canadian company has become Washoe Mining of Reno, Nevada, headed up by Kenny Wells. Wells is played by Matthew McConaughey in what we now must deem his full-on gimme-an-Oscar mode: not smooth or suave, but instead sweaty and blowzy and faux bald, suffering from a deplorable excess of personality, showing off all the weight he gained in comic scenes of near nudity.

Wells is “a drunk, a clown” who latches onto geologist Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramírez) and his awesome intuition about where gold might be found in a remote valley in Indonesia. This allows director Stephen Gaghan (in his first feature since 2005’s Syriana) to stage a couple of nice shots that look like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, dudes in Indiana Jones-ish hats gazing out over the jungle, but this is not a treasure-hunt adventure. Soon investors from Wall Street in their sleek suits are desperate to invest in what looks like the “largest gold mine of the decade” (and, later, the largest one “ever”), but Wells is stubborn and wants to maintain control of his find.

Except: It’s not really Wells’ find. It’s Acosta’s, and for a long while I wondered why Gold wasn’t Acosta’s story. And if it had been, it would have automatically smashed many of the cliches that bring Gold down. As is, we’re meant to identify with Wells’ refusal to bow down to the big boys with their corporate might, and his tenacity in sticking with his “dream.” But in spite of McConaughey’s entertaining gusto for the character, Wells simply isn’t very interesting.

Wells is, in fact, ultimately rather contemptible for reasons that – no spoilers – undermine the little bit of meat that Gold has: its mild condemnation of the house of cards that is high finance (investment in the Indonesian mine is out of control long before a single ounce of gold is ever brought out of the ground), of the corruption and collusion among governments and corporations (oh, the things Wells has to do to convince the Indonesians to let them keep digging!).

Gold seems to be implying, for a little while, that it’s a bad thing that everyone here seems to think that as long as they’re all getting rich, nothing else matters, not even reality, like having an actual lump of gold to hold in your hand. But I left feeling like the movie condones that attitude, without even realizing that it’s doing that. Wells may be bursting with purpose, but Gold certainly isn’t.

Gold (2 1/2) • Directed by Stephen Gaghan • Starring Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramírez, Bryce Dallas Howard • Rated R • 121 min. • At Century Cinemas Del Monte, Northridge Cinemas, Maya Cinemas