One image from Anthony Hayes’s Gold lingers in the mind: Zac Efron’s face. Over the course of this routine survival thriller’s running time, the one-time Disney Channel golden boy’s handsome mug is subjected to the harsh conditions of the Outback, turning ever more ghoulishly cracked, blistered, and bloodied along the way. Throughout, Efron seems almost determined to wipe away the last vestiges of his youthful looks.
In a near-future dystopia redolent of the original Mad Max and David Michôd’s The Rover, Efron’s character, simply credited as Man One, arrives by train at a remote desert outpost. It’s there that he meets Man Two (Hayes), after which the pair drives out into the Outback in pursuit of the promise of new opportunities. Forced to make a sudden pit stop to deal with car troubles, the men stumble upon a humongous gold nugget buried in the ground. Without the proper tools on hand to unearth it, though, Man Two agrees to drive on to the next town to get an excavator, while Man One stays put to guard the gold until his partner returns.
As another entry in a long line of stripped-down man-versus-nature tales, Gold proceeds in routine fashion from this point onward. With Man Two’s journey expected to take several days, Man One has to consequently withstand scorching heat, relentless sun, violent sandstorms, packs of wild dogs, and a mysterious stranger (Susie Porter) in order to protect his cash cow.
In what’s largely a wordless one-man show, Efron gives an intensely physical performance that helps to sell the external nightmare of this scenario. But in sharp contrast to, say, Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours and Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away, we come to know next to nothing about Efron’s stoic protagonist, which ultimately saps our investment in the outcome of his ordeal.
All that we learn about Man One, when the chattier Man Two tries to make conversation with him near the start of the film, is that he “comes from the West,” before he clams up completely when prodded further. In terms of character shading, even the two desert wanderers at the center of Gus Van Sant’s stubbornly abstract Gerry are more precisely etched.
As Man One becomes increasingly agitated by Man Two’s failure to return, the film invites us to wonder whether his cohort has ulterior motives. Unfortunately, the answer is every bit as obvious as Hayes’s visual metaphors. Gold wants to convey the dog-eat-dog mentality of our contemporary world. But by culminating in a last-second punchline that feels like the hollow basis on which the entire project has been built, and relying so heavily on gratingly literal motifs, such as ravenous dogs scrapping among each other on the periphery of the frame, it doesn’t dig up anything that isn’t already evident on the surface.
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