Movie Review - 'Fool's Gold'

Fool's Gold

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson, and Donald Sutherland
Directed by Andy Tennant
Rated PG-13

Fool’s Gold, the second tango starring Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, is exactly that: The promise of an elusive fortune that, once you hold it in your hands, is worth a lot less than its allure.

McConaughey and Hudson have a very natural chemistry, which is something to pursue, since even the best actors can struggle to master it, not that the stars of Fool’s Gold are often confused for our best actors. But there’s something in their work together – here and in the equally hokum How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days – that doesn’t exist when they’re on their own. Call it an instinctive familiarity, a safety net, whatever: You believe they could be a couple and just as easily buy into the reasons why they could be former flames.

They’re in the latter category here as a low-rent treasure hunter and his newly minted ex-wife stumbling onto what may be the greatest buried treasure in the world. With the easy connection of its stars and a time-honored plot, there’s no reason Fool’s Gold couldn’t be an update of Romancing the Stone.

But it misses the mark in several ways, all of which should have been avoided. For starters, if director Andy Tenant (Hitch) has a proven on-screen couple at his disposal, why on Earth does he spent copious amounts of time developing a father-daughter relationship between the multi-millionaire bankrolling the treasure hunt (Donald Sutherland) and his airhead heiress (Alexis Dziena)?

Secondly, why does the story of the lost treasure have to be so convoluted? For a movie earnestly designed to be a simplistic romp, the legend behind the missing gold sure is taxing. And while the payoffs to certain gags in this adventure comedy seem to fit, the setups for them are wildly unrealistic, as if there was no rational, conceivable way to get the story to those big finishes.

Case in point: At the beginning of Fool’s Gold, McConaughey’s tattered boat, The Booty Call, catches fire and sinks while he’s diving beneath it. It’s amusing enough for this kind of material, but what causes the fire is a faulty compressor burning a loose piece of paper that is blown around the boat by a gentle island breeze before it lands on the curtains, catching them on fire, which leads to more of the boat catching fire and so on and so on and so on until the boat finally ends up on the ocean floor.

That’s a lot of work to sink a boat, and it’s exactly that kind of effort that sinks Fool’s Gold.