Fool's Gold

Though it's not the best trailer I've seen, I have to commend the people behind the ad campaign for Fool's Gold in making the movie looking like a potentially fun little romantic comedy adventure yarn. The movie itself, running nearly two hours, isn't nearly as lively or energetic as the two minute trailer. It's oddly talky, leisurely-paced, and lacks even the slightest of romantic sparks between its two lead stars. The two of you who have been haunted by many sleepless nights, wondering when Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson would reunite after 2003's How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, will no doubt finally be able to rest easy with the arrival of Fool's Gold. Everyone else will be greeted with a perfectly mediocre film that never quite takes off like it should.

Free-spirited treasure hunter and adventurer Ben Finnegan (Matthew McConaughey) is having both the best and worst day of his life as the film opens. He's finally discovered what he believes to be the key to a long-lost sunken treasure that he's been searching for years. Accompanying this discovery is the fact that his boat blows up in a freak accident, some hired goons from a criminal who he's largely in debt with are trying to kill him, and his wife and long-time treasure seeking partner, Tess (Kate Hudson) has just made the divorce papers final. She's tired of Ben's slacker attitude, and wants to go back to Chicago to finish school. Fate brings the two together when Ben winds up on the private yacht of millionaire, Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland), and his spoiled, clueless socialite daughter, Gemma (Alexis Dziena). Tess just happens to be working as a steward on the ship, and finds herself drawn back into Ben's world of treasure hunting when he reveals what could be the piece to the puzzle they've long been seeking when they were working together. As their search for the sunken gold begins anew, the previously mentioned criminals after Ben are right on their tail. Led by a rap artist and notorious gangster named Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart), the crooks will do everything to make sure that Ben and Tess don't arrive at the treasure alive.

Fool's Gold was obviously intended to be a fun, romantic adventure about a couple who rekindles their love for each other while outrunning outlaws and rival treasure hunters, while solving dangerous traps and cryptic riddles. The formula worked back in 1984 with Romancing the Stone, and I think it could have worked here with the right approach. It's easy to see why McConaughey and Hudson are starring in a movie together again. They have a good chemistry during their scenes alone, they're both beautiful people, and they make a great pair. The problem is director Andy Tennant (Hitch) doesn't give them enough chances to truly create a relationship beyond physical attraction. The movie gives the audience plenty of time to admire both of their bodies. So much time indeed that McConaughey spends probably 90% of the movie with his shirt off, which is sure to draw in just about all of his female fans. The problem is, beyond the physical attraction, there's nothing there. We never truly learn much about Ben or Tess as a couple, other than Ben is great in the sack. We don't learn much about what initially brought them together, and why they stayed together for the time they did. There's the shared interest in history and seeking lost treasures, yes, but that's about it besides the whole sex thing. They never seem like an actual couple, rather they seem like two people brought together by a casting director with a good eye.

It's not just the relationship between the strangely uncharismatic leads that seems waterlogged, it's the entire movie itself. For an adventure film, Fool's Gold sure does spend way too much time in the cramped confines of a luxury yacht. The characters sit around, deciphering old texts and digging up information, but it never really grabs our attention. There's strangely very little action or a sense of danger, since the film's villains barely even show up, and come across merely as an afterthought. All the action-oriented sequences depicted in the trailer of the heroes dodging explosions, riding motorcycles through a jungle, and attempting to perform a water landing in a private plane literally happens during the final 20 minutes or so in the movie. I do admit, the movie does definitely pick up at this point, and there are some well staged action sequences during these moments. But, obviously, it's too little too late by this point. The movie seems focused on the characters, but at the same time, the characters are not developed enough for it to spend so much time on them. The screenplay by director Tennant, along with co-writers John Claflin and Daniel Zelman (Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid), kind of spins its wheels under the mistaken impression that we're just as interested in the legend of the sunken treasure. Therefore, we're "treated" to overly long scenes where the characters spend way too much time describing the same background story we get at the very beginning of the movie in a couple brief subtitles that pop up before the opening credits.

This is a movie that I kept on waiting to grab me, but it never quite went all the way with its own potential. Aside from a couple cute moments concerning Donald Sutherland's character putting up with his ditzy adult daughter, the script contains barely a humorous moment that wasn't already given away in the trailer. Fool's Gold is not a terrible movie, just an extremely disappointing one. It takes a beautiful cast and beautiful tropical scenery, and then does nothing with the scenery and forces the cast to read books and walk around underwater. If it winds up never being a complete waste of time, it's only because of the natural charm of the stars, not with anything in the actual film itself. There's nothing new to see here, and what there is to see, there's no reason to see it again.

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