Zac Efron stars in an unrelentingly miserable post-apocalyptic movie from the Australian actor and director Anthony Hayes.
There’s a type of blunt, brutal fable about men and avarice that has been reworked every decade or so since Erich von Stroheim’s silent epic “Greed” was released in 1924. The middling “Gold,” directed by Anthony Hayes from a screenplay he wrote with Polly Smyth (who is also Hayes’s spouse), is one of them. It rides on the dusty coattails of touchstones of the genre: think “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the “Mad Max” franchise and “There Will Be Blood.”
“Gold” is set on a sunbaked wasteland, in a future in which an apocalyptic war has scarred the earth. (The film was shot in Australia, so the mettle of “Mad Max” hovers over each frame.) Among the blackened craters left by the war live a few sweaty, irritable survivors, all of whom go unnamed — as if they’d waste too much saliva introducing themselves. Zac Efron and Hayes play antisocial strangers car-pooling across the badlands. During an unplanned pit stop, Efron’s character, the more soft-bellied of the two travelers, discovers a massive chunk of gold bigger than both men combined. Hauling it out of the sand will be a test of endurance for the characters — who Efron and Hayes ground in a weary, wary reserve — and for the audience, which must suffer watching Efron’s skin become riddled with sun blisters that appear to be supercharged by radiation. There’s no missing the message that we’re in a dog-eat-dog world. But we’re shown an actual dog eating a dog just in case.
The movie’s mood is unrelentingly miserable. Its cinematography, by Ross Giardina, is bleached-bone bright; its soundscape features more buzzing flies than music. The closest thing to hope comes from a line that the script — apparently calling for us to value our own planet while we still can — has Efron pant to a scorpion: “Look at you, crawling on a massive cluster of gold your whole life and you don’t even know it.”
Gold
Rated R for pain and anguish. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
