Well-named, this one.
Alternately annoying and wearying, Fool’s Gold is a specious, mechanical, monumentally uninteresting romantic misadventure, a sunken clunker about sunken treasure that’s no treasure by any measure.
The stars, Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, aren’t charmless or untalented or unappealing.
Not exactly.
But they’re obviously going through the motions here – sparks between them are nonexistent – and the script they’re saddled with is suffocatingly dense and synthetic.
McConaughey and Hudson teamed up in 2003 in the clunky but popular romcom, How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days. They reunite here as Ben and Tess Finnegan, an estranged married couple on the verge of divorce.
Call it How To Lose an Audience in Ten Minutes.
Ben, known as Finn, is a free spirit and treasure hunter, an irresponsible and unreliable adventurer determined to find the legendary 18th-century Queen’s Dowry, 40 chests of Spanish treasure long last at sea. His obsession has already cost him his marriage to Tess, who now works as a steward on a yacht owned by billionaire Nigel Honeycutt, played (with a shaky British accent) by Donald Sutherland.
As for Finn, he’s still operating out of his unreliable salvage boat, Booty Calls. Then Finn discovers a vital clue to the whereabouts of the Queens Dowry. So he finagles his way onto the yacht and convinces Nigel and his daughter (Alexis Dziena, overacting her bimbo role as if she were an inflated parade float) to join him in pursuit of the treasure.
Not surprisingly, Tess, her spirit of adventure pretty much beaten out of her, objects. But she’s outvoted and off they go.
Now if they were the only ones in pursuit of this particular prize, it might be an easy quest. But Finn’s ex-mentor, played by Ray Winstone, is also after it, as is a local gangster (Kevin Hart).
Ah, who cares?
Director Andy Tennant (Hitch, Sweet Home Alabama, Fools Rush In, Ever After) – leaving no cliche or convention unturned and, apparently, not minding the inclusion of considerable condescendingly counterfeit dialogue – gives us no reason whatsoever to care about either the people hunting for the sunken treasure or the treasure itself.
Consequently, this is an excruciatingly predictable exercise to sit through, with by-the-numbers action sequences that are so amateurishly unconvincing as to insult our intelligence, invoking yawns where the laughs and cheers ought to be.
There’s enough detailed exposition, delivered in dialogue-heavy scenes that bring the already sluggish narrative to a grinding halt, to sink a boat. And not a shred of it beckons us.
Instead, we find ourselves, from the very beginning of this uninspired and uninspiring enterprise, just waiting for the tepid tall tale to wrap itself up – and trying desperately to think of a way to hasten the process.
So we’ll hunt for 1-1/2 stars out of 4 for a torturous and waterlogged sleepwalker that’s a quick ticket to slumberland.
Never for an instant does Fool’s Gold pan out.
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