FOOL’S GOLD
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson. Written by Andy Tennant,
John Claflin, Daniel Zelman. Directed by Andy Tennant. (PG) 112 min.
Opens Feb 8
Fool’s Gold attempts to resuscitate a flat-lined genre: the rollicking adventure comedy. What differentiates it from the National Treasure series are its frequent intimations of sex and not-quite R-rated violence (though a climactic geyser of blood is ickier than it needs to be). If I’ve inadvertently made it sound appealing, then I apologize, because Andy Tennant’s film is ugly, lazy and charmless — as if a film starring the ever-brittle Kate Hudson could be expected to be charming.
The script keeps informing us that Hudson’s character, a former treasure seeker reduced to working as a steward on a rich Brit’s (Donald Sutherland) yacht in the wake of her wastrel ex-husband’s (Matthew McConaughey) bad behavior, is one sharp customer. It has to, because Hudson is not a performer who radiates cunning. In this regard, she’s well-matched with McConaughey, who has cornered the market on acting dense with his shirt off. So we’ve got our “fools;” the “gold” is introduced in the form of some ancient doubloons (the payload of a sunken 18th Century Spanish galleon) buried in the sand off the Florida coast.
Using Sutherland’s yacht as their base of operations, Hudson and McConaughey attempt to locate the coins, in the process incurring the wrath of a bad-boy rapper/self-styled local martinet (Kevin Hart), helping the rich man reconnect with his dim-bulb daughter (Alexis Dziena) and of course, reigniting their mutual attraction. And, to go along with the de rigeur punching, kissing and seaplane crashes, there are some lovely touches, like writing the three black characters as greedy, stupid, scaredy-cats (and brutally killing two of them); contriving two wisecracking burly-bear gay chef sidekicks for Hudson (and then drooling over her shirtless co-star); and setting up a slapstick gag where the bikini-clad Dziena spreads her legs so a sword can plunge suggestively into the foreground between them. Forget charmless — how about hateful?