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February 8, 2008 > Arts & Entertainment > Good-looking Fool’s Gold has little below the surface

Good-looking Fool’s Gold has little below the surface

By Liz Mallett | For the Thresher

Fool’s Gold, director Andy Tennant’s latest film, is a movie that incorporates many genres but succeeds at none. As a romance it is often tense and unfulfilling, and as an adventure film, it is cartoonish and improbable. The movie is best in its comedic moments, but they are not worth experiencing the rest of the film.

Kate Hudson (You, Me and Dupree) and Matthew McConaughey (Failure to Launch) co-star as Tess Finnegan and Ben ‘Finn’ Finnegan, a pair of history buffs on the verge of divorce. The movie begins as the divorce is finalized, and from then on follows the pair as they find themselves thrown together on a quest for lost treasure in the Caribbean.

Naturally they have diametrically opposed personalities — Tess is responsible and well-educated; Finn is irresponsible, immature and deeply in debt to a local thug and rapper named Bigg Bunny (Scary Movie 4’s Kevin Hart). But the unhappy couple is reunited through freak chance and a common fascination with finding an 18th-century ocean treasure called the Queen’s Dowry. With the help of an eccentric billionaire named Nigel Honeycutt (Pride and Prejudice’s Donald Sutherland), his ditzy daughter Gemma (Sex and Breakfast’s Alexis Dziena) and an accompanying cast of blatantly stereotyped minor sidekicks, they embark on their quest.

Fool’s Gold dwells on the tension between Finn and Tess for too long. This slows the first half of the movie, making it clear why the couple divorced initially but also hard to accept the existence of chemistry between the pair. Some of the best moments of the Fool’s Gold transcend this all-too-accurate portrayal of the antipathy of divorce, but at times, Tennant tries to create chemistry with cheap sexual innuendos.

Even worse is that the main characters simply are not well-developed. Hudson’s character does not realistically come across as a Ph.D. candidate, no matter how much jargon spouts from her lips. McConaughey looks fantastic in all of his scenes, but he doesn’t have the likeability of peer actors like Owen Wilson or Vince Vaughn, either of whom might have pulled of his air of insouciant irresponsibility with more charm and humor.

The supporting actors of Fool’s Gold do a fine job of filling in the gaps left by the main stars despite the limited range of character they are given with the script. Dziena is absolutely hilarious: Think Paris Hilton’s cheerful dimwittedness combined with the incoherent earnestness of Teen Miss South Carolina. Sutherland is convincing and sweet in his familiar role as a doting father, drawing perhaps more sympathy from the audience than the two protagonists.

On the positive side, the movie features beautiful scenery — much of the filming was done in the Bahamas — complemented by a cast that even at its worst is relentlessly gorgeous and bikini-clad. The soundtrack is another saving grace, featuring classic reggae hits by artists like Bob Marley. In fact, given that Fool’s Gold is essentially a repetition of every strategy employed by romantic comedies already in existence, the audience could easily experience the positive characteristics of this film by simply listening to a reggae CD in a comfortable chair.

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