Metal fatigue

‘All that glisters is not gold,’ wrote Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice), and you have to hand it to the guy, as he’s nailed it on the head. This Gold certainly glisters. You look at the poster and think: ‘Oh, yes. Glistery.’ It’s directed by Stephen Gaghan, who wrote and directed the terrific Syriana. It stars Matthew McConaughey. It’s based on a true mining scandal that is as outrageous as it is fascinating. But this Gold is not gold. It has its highly entertaining moments, and there is some fun to be had in McConaughey’s madly over-zealous performance but it is derivative (of The Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, American Hustle; with lots of men yelling into phones about money) and there are so many storytelling impulses on the go that none has any hope of ever hitting home. It isn’t the destination, it’s the journey, some people say, but I like to get some place, myself.

The inspiration for the film is the Canadian businessman David Walsh and the Nineties Bre-X mining scandal (look it up if you’ve a mind; you won’t regret it). But here the action has been moved to 1980s America where a fictionalised character, Kenny Wells (McConaughey), is trying to keep his family’s mining business afloat through a series of increasingly desperate schemes. His company, founded by his grandfather, which once occupied swanky offices, now operates from a dingy bar where Kenny and his few remaining employees yell down those phones as they hustle for business. No one wants to know him. He visits a banker, who dispatches underlings to send him on his way. The humiliation! (I loved that scene because I always love that scene. It is not an unfamiliar scene, I think we can agree, and of course we’re set to wonder: will Kenny get to do the humiliating in time?)