Fool's
Gold
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
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