Review: 'Big Gold Brick' makes a big loud thud

Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2022.

Instantly in the running for one of the worst movies of 2022, "Big Gold Brick" does its best to squander it's several well-known actors, and succeeds.

Grade: D

There's a kind of film that, at its core, is cool and stylish. This is not to be confused with a film having "confidence." There are many confident films - confident filmmakers - that end up making a real mess. Add "Big Gold Brick" to the latter pile. It's a film that possesses loads of confidence, to be sure, but it's a shamble of sights, sounds and film-school-level tricks that coalesce into a big glob of maddening cinematic sludge.

Sam (Emory Cohen) appears to now be an established author, who recounts how he came to write the biography of an eccentric tycoon, Floyd Deveraux (Andy Garcia), after Deveraux ran him over with his car one night. Being sucked into Deveraux's world, he encounters a number of crazed characters that only exist in movies like this: from Deveraux's trophy wife, Jacqueline (Megan Fox) to yellow-tint-glasses-wearing Anselm, a sure-fire Razzie-worthy performance played by Oscar Isaac, who inexplicably was game for this level of nonsense. Oh, and there are sub-plots as well about how Sam may possess super-human abilities and how Deveraux's house might very well be haunted.

Nothing is as it seems, but no one will care. This movie will make a big loud thud when it lands in select theaters and On Demand this weekend, proving the spin on the old adage, "all that glitters is not gold."  This "Big Gold Brick" doesn't just glitter, it hurts your eyes.

Grade: D
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Genre: Comedy, Fantasy.
Run Time: 2 hours 12 minutes.
Not Rated.

Starring: Megan Fox, Oscar Isaac, Lucy Hale, Andy Garcia, Emory Cohen, Shiloh Fernandez, Alys Crocker.

Written and Directed by Brian Petsos (feature-film directorial debut).

"Big Gold Brick" is in theaters and On Demand on Friday, February 25th, 2022.