(3.5 / 5)
‘Gold’ works for its melodrama, its subtle humour as well as the expected grand finale…
Akshay Kumar has lately been hitting gold at the box office for the right reason. All his movies of recent past specially the offbeat ones have hit the target at the box office. His latest release ‘Gold’ surprisingly hogs the podium none the less.
‘Gold’ narrates the story of Tapan Das (subtly enacted by Akshay Kumar), the Indian hockey team manager who leads his Indian Hockey Team to win its maiden Olympic gold as an independent India and that too on the soil of Britain which just a year earlier had provided India its independence.
The movie stands for patriotism and the rising of a phoenix from the scratch. Despite India under the British rule has been winning accolades at the Olympics in the field of hockey, it’s this ‘Gold’ that India won as an independent India in 1948 that sets the patriotism tune going.
While the story part fiction and part facts ticks all the boxes in the right place, somehow the casting has been let down a bit. What had worked for ‘Chak De India’ was that the spotlight was more on the hockey team rather than its lead star Shahrukh Khan. In ‘Gold’s instance, it was the other way around that lets down the movie to an extent.
While the makers have taken liberty to play with what actually happened in the London Olympics final when India beat England, they managed to pull off the dramatized version with added spices, keeping true to the ‘Gold’ win and at the same time playing to the gallery i.e. the Box Office. If only they had added more genuine snippets of the Indian hockey scenario back then, the forgotten hockey stars who have been sidelined to only record books, it would have done wonders for ‘Gold’ at the box office.
But then the makers are not complaining as the box collection indicates. It has collected approximately Rs.25 crores on the opening day becoming one of the top 5 films with the best opening day collection of 2018.
Directed by Reema Katgi, the film focuses more on Akshay Kumar and his antics with able supporting acts by Mouni Roy, Kunal Kapoor, Vineet Singh, Amit Sadh and major surprise Sunny Kaushal.
The critics have been equally favorable with this ‘Gold’ and Akshay Kumar no doubts adds another ‘Gold’ to his collection.
