Video review: "Gold"

Matthew McConaughey goes Full Skeeze in “Gold,” a little-seen drama that came out near the end of 2016 and didn’t generate the awards buzz hoped for.

He plays Kenny Wells, a has-been/never-was mining prospector at the end of his rope who stumbles across a massive gold deposit in the deepest jungles of Indonesia. The story is loosely based on David Walsh, CEO of Bre-X, whose gold strike was found to be fraudulent back in the 1990s. Tens of billions of dollars in company value went up in smoke overnight.

McConaughey, not long removed from the skeletal figure he struck in his Oscar-winning turn in “Dallas Buyers Club,” spreads an impressive middle-aged paunch to go along with a scanty head of hair, hollow eyes and a mouthful of crooked teeth. Kenny is perpetually sweating and shifty-eyed, the sort of guy who makes others uncomfortable just by walking in the room.

As the story opens, his company is about to go belly-up. His long-suffering girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) seems to have half a foot out the door. But Kenny learns about Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), a geologist who’s come up with a new system for finding mineral deposits that the rest of the industry has scoffed at.

Crabbing together his last few bucks and corralling a few investors, they do some exploratory drilling deep in the bush. Soon they’re just about out of money, the local workers flee the mine and Kenny nearly succumbs to dysentery. But his faith in Michael is unshakeable and, improbably, it bears fruit when soil samples reveal gold.

Soon the big moneymen (Corey Stoll among them), who had previously written off the flimflam man, come begging for some of the crumbs to fall from Kenny’s plate. And Bruce Greenwood plays the cutthroat competitor maneuvering to take it all away.

Directed by Stephen Gaghan (“Syriana”) from a script by John Zinman and Patrick Massett, “Gold” barely made a ripple at the box office. But it’s a worthy film, if a bit overly familiar in its themes, cemented by McConoughey’s fully invested performance.

Inside every slick Wall Street high-roller, like the one McConaughey played in “Wolf of Wall Street,” there’s a hungry scrounger fighting for wealth and respect.

Bonus features are pretty good, and are the same for Blu-ray and DVD editions. They include one deleted sequence, feature commentary by director Gaghan and three making-of featurettes: “The Origins of Gold,” “The Locations of Gold” and “Matthew McConaughey as Kenny Wells.”

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Extras: B

Video review: "The Girl on the Train"

The most important aspect of a potboiler movie is that the pot has to keep boiling, gaining in intensity rather than losing it. “The Girl on the Train,” despite having some strong story elements and a very good performance by Emily Blunt, loses steam to the point the plot congeals.

Blunt plays Rachel, a woman who’s seemingly lost everything -- her career, her marriage, her sobriety, her hopes of having a baby. She spends her days in an alcoholic stupor, riding the train into the city for the job she lost a while ago. This allows her to glide past her old house, where her ex-husband (Justin Theroux) has remarried to the woman he was cheating on her with, and they’ve just had a gorgeous baby girl.

While she’s pummeling herself with this vision of what could have been, Rachel also becomes curious about another couple living a couple of doors down (Haley Bennett and Luke Evans), who tend to have a very, um… vigorous romantic life, which they engage in without apparent regard to the trains passing by their very unobstructed windows.

When this woman goes missing, Rachel becomes a prime suspect, since she had one of her frequent blackouts on that day and woke up confused and bloody (not hers). Nonetheless she undertakes her own amateur investigation, befriending the grieving husband and signing up for therapy sessions with their shrink.

Slowly, she starts to emerge from her self-induced fog -- just as the dangers grow to confront her.

Based on the novel by Paula Hawkins (unread by me), “The Girl on the Train” loses momentum as it goes rather than gaining it. Director Tate Taylor and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson give us their own mediocre version of “Gone Girl,” which accomplished almost everything this film does not.

It’s too bad Blunt’s haunting performance got wasted with such inept plotting.

Bonus features are pretty good. They include deleted and extended scenes, a couple of making-of documentaries and a feature-length commentary track with director Taylor.

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Extras:

Film review: "The Girl on the Train"

“The Girl on the Train” feels like it wants to be the next “Gone Girl,” but it doesn’t quite have the same twisted pretzel of emotional anguish and expertly boiling plot. That film constantly raised the stakes, but this one often wanders in a self-medicating daze like its heroine.

Did I say heroine? The best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins actually has three, all of whom share the first-person perspective at points. Emily Blunt is the clear star here, so director Tate Taylor and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson take the curious route of telling the story through her eyes, then pulling aside to reveal stuff she couldn’t possibly have seen or known.

The result is a confused and confusing psycho-sexual thriller that plays like a “Roshomon” that wanders deep into a thicket of shifting perspectives it can’t sort out itself. Then it rescues things through conventional plot devices it dusted off from other movies.

The movie’s one saving grace is Blunt, who goes deep into her character of Rachel, who’s an utter mess. Her marriage cratered because of her alcoholism and their inability to have a baby – not to mention her husband Tom’s (Justin Theroux) philandering. Now he’s married to the woman he was cheating on her with, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and they’ve just had a gorgeous daughter.

They’re living in Rachel’s old house next to the rail line in Ardsley, a quiet upstate New York commuter town. Every day, Rachel takes the train into the big city, ostensibly for her job but also so she can spy on them and dissolve into a pool of resentment and self-pity. Constantly sipping from a CamelBak water bottle she’s secretly filled with clear booze, Rachel is perpetually stumbling around and experiencing blackouts.

She’s also become fixated on another woman who lives two doors down, Megan (Haley Bennett), a blonde goddess with a hunk of a husband, Scott (Luke Evans), whose amorous attentions toward her are fervent. (Jeez, buy some window shades, folks.)

But there’s more to each woman’s tale than meets the eye, and the strain becomes more intense when Megan goes missing. The cops (Allison Janney plays the chief detective) come sniffing around Rachel, who seems like a top suspect. She had a blackout that day and doesn’t remember much, but was seen chasing Megan and shouting insults at her. And Rachel woke up that night covered in blood.

Blunt really grunges herself up for the role – hollow eyes, ragged lips, tangled hair, even a bit of mustache. She dresses one step up from a bag lady and talks about the twin delusions of rage and envy she has toward the other women. “She’s what I lost. She’s everything I want to be,” she says.

At least early on, much of the appeal of “The Girl on the Train” is exploring such a broken character and contemplating the prospect that she may actually be guilty of some horrendous crime. Flashbacks show her being capable of violence, and even once stole into Anna’s house while she was asleep and carried the baby off into the back yard.

But things spin sideways. We’re introduced to a therapist (Edgar Ramirez) who was treating Megan and may be complicit. Rachel undertakes an amateur Nancy Drew act, befriending Scott and then signing up for her own sessions with the therapist. Just when it feels like the story should be building toward something, it just seems to devolve.

I won’t belabor the clunky maneuvers of the plot, other than to say you’ll probably figure out the true villain long before they’re revealed. It’s never a good thing when the audience reaches the final stop far ahead of the train.