Fool's Gold film review

certificate_12A

FOOL'S GOLD

The definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result. So, the sanity of whoever it was that thought pairing up Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson a second time, following the abysmal How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, must be questioned. As must that of whoever thought there was anything remotely redeeming about this garbled mess. It's hard to gauge at what point a promising project becomes a disastrous film, but in this instance it's difficult to conceive of how it could ever have been considered a promising project. It's almost as puzzling as how the likes of Donald Sutherland and Ray Winstone ever signed on for such humiliation.

Romantic comedies come with a built in low expectation factor. A couple of laughs and a happy ending is pretty much all that is required to send audiences home smiling, so to find yourself irritated and dumbfounded is not a good sign. In the right roles, both McConaughey and Hudson have an unsophisticated appeal, but all too often both find themselves in ill-suited, inferior projects, and then both have a propensity to grate. As they do here.

As the Spanish novelist and philosopher George Santayana astutely pointed out, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Sadly Fool's Gold's filmmakers didn't heed his words. For, in addition to the evidence provided by the stars' previous collaboration (its box office tally notwithstanding), there was Sahara, McConaughey's equally ill-fated attempt at combining a romantic comedy with an adventure plot. The parallels are all too evident. In Hudson's place was Penelope Cruz and the comedic sidekick, played here by Ewan Bremner (as a Ukranian?), was Steve Zahn, but the pitiful result is the same.

Here McConaughey plays Ben "Finn" Finnegan, an irrepressible surf-bum turned treasure hunter. His devotion to seeking out the Queen's Dowry, a royal trove of exotic treasure lost at sea in 1715, has cost him his marriage to Tess (Kate Hudson), who has begun to rebuild her life, taking on a job as a steward on the luxury yacht owned by British billionaire Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland).