Big Gold Brick Review: Fox Is Wasted In Muddled, Uneven, Directionless Comedy

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Big Gold Brick is a movie that is perhaps better and more fully realized in its creator's mind, but unfortunately has manifested onscreen in a perplexing manner that is devoid of reason. Admittedly, what draws viewers into the film is the promise of a zany story about a down-on-his-luck writer hired to write the biography of an enigmatic man named Floyd. Megan Fox and Andy Garcia take up the top half of the film's poster, with the booked and busy Oscar Issac in a monocle in the second half despite barely being in the film at all. Writer-director Brian Petsos' Big Gold Brick promises something idiosyncratic and darkly whimsical, but the execution betrays this vision completely. What is left is a hodgepodge ensemble of actors who could have used their talents elsewhere.

The downtrodden alcoholic writer Samuel (Emory Cohen) is at his wit's end when he decides to pack up and leave. As he walked down a dark road, he may or may not have intentionally stood in front of Floyd’s (Andy Garcia) oncoming vehicle and got hit. By some strange turn of events, Samuel becomes Floyd’s biographer. Interlaced with Samuel’s monotonous recounting of his experience with Floyd is a means of toying with the idea of being serious — as a whole, however, the movie is anything but. Petsos plays with the idea of unreliable narrators and the sense of a tilted reality with playful use of the camera and imagery to indicate Samuel’s loose grip on reality.

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However, for all that these tricks are worth, the movie remains impenetrable. It is hard to get a sense of what Petsos is aiming to achieve, and the result is a film that flounders about for two hours, which is far too long.