Fool's Gold
1.5 Waffles!

If you recently have been sitting around wondering, “what ever happened to Malcolm-Jamal Warner?” I have the answer for you. I just worry Cliff is going to punish Theo for wasting his time and talent in a movie like this.

Matthew McConaughey stars as Finn – an often shirtless treasure hunting and fun loving dude off the coast of Key West seeking an ancient, legendary, and possibly non-existent cache of Spanish gold lost in a shipwreck back in the early 1700’s. While he’s not the brightest bulb in the bunch (I’ll let you insert your own mean, catty and sarcastic comment here), or the most responsible, Finn gets by on personality and his often shirtless chest, but it’s not enough to keep his wife, Tess (Kate Hudson) happy anymore.

Tess has decided to get a divorce after 8 years of marital sexual bliss, but not much marital pleasure outside of the bedroom. However, Finn is the type of dude who just kind of always shows up in the right place at the right time, and he ends up on her boss’s, Nigel (Donald Sutherland), boat, entices him with his stories, and inspires the rich man and his spoiled daughter, Gemma (Alexis Dziena) to help find the treasure, while Finn also wants to win back Tess’s heart and pay back a dangerous and notorious rapper, Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart), who was Finn’s last investor (that is a mouthful of plot twists).

Will Finn find the treasure? Is Tess’s love the true treasure? Does Matthew McConaughey’s contract call for him to be shirtless for a specific amount of time in every movie?

Fool’s Gold, for all of its attempts at wackiness, romance and adventure, is just kind of predictable and average. It makes you wonder if this is the best work most of the cast can find.

McConaughey and Hudson try their best to be the Hepburn and Tracy of our generation, but don’t have the same great scripts needed to propel them to that level. Instead, the two are forced to be passable without ever offending us, putting off the audience or compelling you to throw items at the screen.

Hudson keeps acting and looking cute when needed, delivers on the comedic-overreacting-with-anger scenes and smiles a gorgeous grin worth a million dollars in all of the right places. Meanwhile, McConaughey, who doesn’t don a shirt for the first 20 minutes of Fool’s Gold, rolls with the punches as a guy who is supposed to be a charming, mischievous dreamer. We’ve seen both of them tackles these roles before, while the supporting players are more like caricatures instead of characters, including the moronic princess, the bumbling rich man, the self-absorbed rapper trying to show us how tough he is and more.

Fool’s Gold fails because writers John Claftin and Daniel Zelman, as well as writer/director Andy Tennant don’t make it more than a paint by numbers film that drags on and on towards the end.

So, what about Malcolm-Jamal Warner? He plays one of Bigg Bunny’s henchmen (and he’s supposed to be Jamaican on top of that!). It’s a long way down when you play a stereotype working for a stereotype.

Fool's Gold is rated PG-13 for action violence, some sexual material, brief nudity and language