Review: Gold

For the past five years, Matthew McConaughey has been on a rise that pretty much everyone has been wanting to see.

After showing initial promise in Dazed And Confused, Lone Star, Contact, Amistad and even Reign Of Fire, McConaughey went on a little wonder into the rom-com genre.
For me and many others, it seemed to fall apart for him.

Then in 2011, it all started to slowly turn around. We saw a possible return to form with Bernie and Killer Joe. Then it was Mud and Magic Mike where we knew he was back. Dallas Buyers Club got him a well deserved Oscar. Then the big roles were rolling in with The Wolf Of Wall Street, Interstellar and 2016 features Free State Of Jones, Kubo And The Two Strings and Sing.

Now he is in a fourth 2016 feature.

There was initial promise of Oscar buzz when you saw the premise of this film on paper. But eventually, the limited December release and nationwide release later in 2017 saw that it was not going to be as good as expected.

Now that I've seen it, I can see why that happened. However, it is still a pretty good feature. It opens up nicely and we get to see our main characters intention early on and we are definitely rooting for him. The development of the story and our characters moves along nicely, there are some nice twists and turns and it ends up being loosely based on a true story that you want to know more about.

The cast is pretty good on the whole, both in its choices and performance execution. Matthew McConaughey is really good in this film. He continues to show how great he is at pulling a story along and have many memorable scenes which includes a pretty powerful speech.
Edgar Ramirez was solid on the whole. I like him in most of his roles, which are usually supporting. It was his chemistry with McConaughey that saw him at his strongest here. But I think with a little more screen time and development, his character could have easily competed well with McConaughey's.
Bryce Dallas Howard was a real surprise for me. Not just for being there, but for being a pretty good supporting role. Her moments with McConaughey was very endearing and charming and you can really feel for her every time she is on screen.

I think the reason why this film never delivered its Oscar success potential, is the simple story structure. It never does quite kick into gear to be truly memorable, and yet it did not lose pace to be forgettable and disappointing.

In the end, it was pretty good. Nothing was bad, and yet not much of it felt it was not fully capitalised. McConaughey definitely made this film much more engaging and memorable up to a point.
Sadly if I knew if it was going to be like this, then I would just wait until it is being shown on TV.

Rating: 7/10