Parents' Guide to

Gold Dust

By Brian Costello, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 12+

Gun violence, drugs in bizarre adventure-comedy.

Movie NR 2020 100 minutes
Gold Dust Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

age 15+

Based on 1 parent review

age 15+

This title has:

Too much drinking/drugs/smoking

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: (1):
Kids say: Not yet rated

It's unclear what the filmmakers were going for with this unfocused movie. While there are attempts at silly comedy, these attempts seem strange in light of the fact that one of the many threads to the story centers on kids kidnapped by a drug cartel and forced to smuggle heroin across the border. What could have been a bumbling caper in the tradition of Abbott and Costello gets lost in the morass of an unwieldy story. It doesn't help that the attempts at humor are as excruciating as watching an aspiring stand-up at a comedy club open mic bomb so horribly, it's downright awkward.

It's obviously low-budget, and while one might cut the movie some slack because of this, there's an unshakable feeling that the script needed at least one more rewrite, if not several, and the scenes needed considerably less improvisation from the two lead characters. (The Lord of the Rings Orc imitation grows especially irritating instead of funny.) After a while, you start to forget why the movie is even called Gold Dust -- something about heroin being the gold of today. Even in skilled hands, it's hard to pull off silliness when your subject matter is heroin, and when it doesn't work, the unentertaining result is, well, this.

Movie Details

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