Gold movie review: Akshay Kumar is biggest weakness in film that glitters only intermittently

Mumbai: In the game with a solitary actor with proven star power, Gold, written and directed by Reema Kagti, glitters only intermittently. Hinging overly on the inner and external struggles of a fictitious character essayed by Akshay Kumar, the sports drama does not adequately mine the individual stories of the plucky players who got the better of Great Britain on the latter’s home turf to win independent India’s first Olympic field hockey gold in 1948.
With the spotlight squarely on Tapan Das, a team manager grappling with his own set of issues in a battle to stay relevant in free India’s hockey plans, neither the turmoil of the times nor the dynamics of assembling a winning combination in the face of severe odds are depicted in their entirety or with the requisite force. Gold leaves an entire goldmine untapped.
This film is primarily about avenging “do sau saal ki ghulami (200 years of slavery)”, so the principal enemy is England, not Pakistan. This is one aspect of Gold that sets it apart from other Bollywood sports films. When the Indians takes on Great Britain in the London Olympic final, Pakistani players in the stands cheer them on. And before Pakistan plays the Netherlands in the semis, the Indian manager goes to the former team’s change room and greets the captain, a former protege.
But, then, the protagonist is a Bengali and stereotyping is inevitable. Even when that man seems to be speaking grammatically perfect Hindi, he has to have a thick regional accent. He and his wife have to frequently break into Bangla to prove which part of the country they belong to. Which self-respecting Bengali in a Bollywood film can get by without uttering “Urri baba”, “gondogol” or “aami jaani” a few times? Tapan Das follows the script. His wife, played by Mouni Roy, adds her bit to the macher jhol syndrome: she pronounces fish as ‘feesh’. It stinks.
The lead actor of Gold should have been the film’s strength. He instead turns out to be its biggest weakness – he overshadows, or in many cases completely blanks out, the little real-life stories that might have made the film a more complete and complex portrait of a hockey team that made history.