Better left buried

>> Fool’s Gold is a supposedly romantic treasure hunt that falls flat on all counts

TREASURE, NO PLEASURE:
Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey

by MALCOLM FRASER

As far as romantically comic pairings go, Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey are a sketchy proposition. They each have a limited reserve of likeability, and it gets used up very quickly in Fool’s Gold, in which they play a divorced couple who find themselves reunited to search for sunken treasure off the Florida Keys. The result is a spectacular failure to achieve comedy, romance, adventure, or the most threadbare shred of interest.

The film is fascinating in its ability to screw up the most basic demands of Hollywood storytelling, a form which isn’t intellectually demanding to begin with. We’re first introduced to the characters: McConaughey is a flaky, ne’er-do-well undersea adventurer, and Hudson is a frustrated historian who’s stuck waitressing on a yacht while awaiting her divorce from him. As it happens, her boss (Donald Sutherland) is a multi-millionaire, and McConaughey somehow convinces him to get involved in the search for the elusive treasure that Hudson and McConaughey ruined their marriage trying to find. Sutherland’s bimbo daughter (Alexis Dziena) is dropped into the mix for no discernible reason. Sutherland looks pained throughout, and I don’t blame him; some gigs just aren’t worth the money.

After these introductions, along with those of several other completely unnecessary supporting characters, Hudson and McConaughey tell the story of the treasure they’re looking for. Dates, names and events are rushed through in a confusing exchange, and are then referred to throughout the film, as though they’d actually been coherently laid out as a premise, while the wacky group hunts the treasure.

Perhaps Hudson thought the seafaring motif that served her parents so well in Overboard would work here, but no dice. Who knows what director Andy Tennant (of Sweet Home Alabama and the Will Smith misfire Hitch) was thinking while spearheading this dismal exercise, but his editor (who could have cut half an hour and maybe given it some coherence) and music supervisor (who drops in watered-down versions of predictable reggae classics) should be sentenced to exile on a desert island along with him. He’s succeeded in making an adventure uninteresting, an exotic locale uninviting, and a relationship between two attractive people utterly unsexy; in that sense, Fool’s Gold is a notable accomplishment.

Fool’s Gold opens
this Friday, Feb. 8

>> Movie Listings