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The nugget

Threat advisory: Guarded - General risk of entertaining activities

Movie propaganda

Being filthy rich is a dirty business.

A gentle morality tale about a group of three road workers who stumble upon the world's biggest nugget, and become instant millionaires - or so they think. The road workers are mates from way back, and each weekend they go out to an old goldmining site hoping to make it rich. Each weekend they come back with nothing but a hangover. But then everything changes when they discover The Nugget - worth many millions of dollars. The nugget looks at how instant wealth suddenly changes the lives of these working class men - not necessarily for the better, but often with hilarious consequences.

Persons of interest

Eric Bana .... Lotto
Stephen Curry .... Wookie
Belinda Emmett .... Cheryl
Jean Kittson .... Joyce
Peter Moon .... Ratner
Dave O'Neil .... Sue
Karen Pang .... Moon-Chu
Vince Colosimo
Chris Haywood
Alan Brough
Max Cullen
Bill Bennett .... Screenwriter
Bill Bennett .... Director

Cinematic intelligence sources

Awards and film festivals:

Toronto International Film Festival 2002: Contemporary World Cinema

Studios and distributors:

Roadshow Films

Intelligence analyst

Special Agent Matti

Theatrical report

A morality tale about the way that sudden, upward changes in financial status causes change in interpersonal relationships.

To put it another way, they struck it rich and then got greedy.

This is not a new idea - it is, in fact, a cliche - and that causes The nugget's arse to drag along the ground just like the back of Lotto's overloaded ute. There are no surprises in the script but there are just enough low-brow jokes to secure funding; see if you can guess which Australian commercial television station invested in the film, which will count toward their local content quota.

Don't blame the actors for the poor showing of The nugget (actors are just prostitutes by another name), blame instead Bill Bennett, who wrote a mediocre script then sold it to some business people with more money than artistry.

Security censorship classification

M (Low level coarse language)

Surveillance time

97 minutes (1:37 hours)

Not for public release in Australia before date

Film: 17 October 2002
DVD rental: 5 March 2003
VHS rental: 5 March 2003