Big Gold Brick
SAMUEL GOLDWYN FILMSWashed-up, wiped out by the high standards of the horror genre, imprisoned by a career choice that was seen featured in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, or just in need of an easy project before leaping aboard the Marvel gravy train. These are just some of the reasons certain cast members appear in Big Gold Brick, a black comedy feature that predicts its own downfall accidentally. Any film to call itself “genre-bending,” as this Brian Petsos-directed feature does is merely masquerading as a feature that, at some point or another, lost its way. Big Gold Brick blinded itself long before it was released, and it is a miracle that anything came of this project.
More power to Petsos though, who has tried to make a comedy that shoots for the stars. It keeps going though, no clear sign of stopping ever presents itself in a film that doesn’t have the budget to make the big laughs work or the subtlety to make the smaller parts bite right. Charting the rise and rise of an author in its opening moments employs all the classic author tropes that Hunter S. Thompson lived through and everyone else has tried to replicate since. Writers as twisted minds is an overblown concept, but Big Gold Brick is annoying with how wild it gets along such a pattern of thought. That is a grand issue for Petsos not just in how he presents his protagonist, but in how he does anything within Big Gold Brick.
It is a feature not without aim but without trust in itself. Hidden behind these wild guitar riffs and outbursts of rage is, surely, a redeemable quality or message. But it is hidden well, and whenever there is some sense of being close to the heart of what Petsos is trying to conjure, Big Gold Brick has the gall to chastise its audience for thinking themselves so clever. Fighting against your audience, alienating them when they have ideas or perspectives of what the big point of it all is. Big Gold Brick is geared toward that, and it is a sign that Petsos does not know what he wishes to say or do. A shame, considering he has amassed the likes of Oscar Isaac, Megan Fox, Lucy Hale and Andy García in a finely-tuned ensemble where they do not do anything of particular note. Can they even be blamed for that, though? They cannot do much with the tools they have.
But a poor workman blames his tools, right? Not in this instance. Big Gold Brick is a feature without interest in its own thought process. Bouncing around with poorly-planned segments that never feel connected, an Emory Cohen lead delivers very little. He looks like a cheap façade of David Foster Wallace, without the intrigue. Without the charm. Everything is built around that in this Petsos-written work, the sleight of hand and wild eyes of a man suffering from strange visions are simply not enough to keep such a dull feature afloat. Little can be done for the budget scrawling its way through pot-luck segments that might fit together if audiences strain their eyes. But that would be as headache-inducing as the efforts of Petsos.