Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
2/9/08
All movies are products:
the best we as moviegoers can hope for is that what we are being sold is
a rich storytelling experience filled with entertainment. Sadly,
many filmmakers lack the nerve to sell us “a vision”, “a story”, or even
“a movie” and are content to fire action, comedy, romance and wacky gay
sidekicks into the audience like T-shirts out of a cannon at a sporting
event. And when it works, I'm dutifully entertained and keep my mouth
shut. When it doesn't, you get something like the aptly titled Fool's
Gold, a reunion of the stars of the hatefully cynical romantic comedy
blockbuster How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days that glistens with high
production values and good intentions but just can't deliver the goods.
In their absence, we get a parade of demographically diverse characters
and desperately pandering moments trying to give every single audience
member something to hold onto.
Eight years ago, Tess (Kate
Hudson) went to Florida on Spring Break and ended up married to and invested
in the treasure hunting life of Benjamin “Finn” Finnegan (Matthew McConaughey).
Together they became obsessed with an 18th-Century shipwreck that scuttled
a huge Spanish treasure called The Queen's Dowry. But all Finn's
hunting has gotten them no closer to the treasure and left them deeply
in debt and in constant danger from thugs like rap star Bigg Bunny (Kevin
Hart), who's also searching for The Dowry. Tess divorces Finn and
takes a job as Steward on the yacht of billionaire Nigel Honeycutt (Donald
Sutherland), who's in Florida to pick up his estranged daughter Gemma (Alexis
Dziena) and spend a few weeks with her. Seeing an easy mark to put
up more expedition money, Finn moves in on the Honeycutts and gets his
wish: Nigel is desperate for something he and his daughter can do
together. So the Finnegans are reunited as part of the treasure hunt,
but they've got some new competition: Bigg Bunny has hired Finn's
mentor-turned rival Moe Fitch (Ray Winstone) to find The Queen's Dowry
first.
I couldn't help thinking
over and over while watching Fool's Gold that I bet the screenplay
(by John Claflin & Daniel Zelman and director Andy Tennent) reads better
than it plays on screen, because so many things outside the script's control
go wrong. First and most importantly, Hudson and McConaughey strike
absolutely no sparks as a couple (they fared better in How to Lose a
Guy), even a troubled one. For all they bicker, neither their
hearts nor the movie's are in the breakup, and they come across as cordial
colleagues who keep having screenplay-mandated fights and falling into
each other's arms. Because the movie invests no energy in making
them fall back in love, we need star turns that make the chemistry undeniable,
and we just don't get them. Hart is OK as Bigg Bunny, but the notion
of a rabbit-obsessed hip hop king battling our heroes demands an all-in
star turn he doesn't even try to give. And Tennent's action direction
is fatally inept, with the big climax just lumbering and lumbering along,
made all the clearer by how many of its' same beats occurred at the end
of Speed 2: Cruise Control, staged so much better there by
action virtuoso Jan de Bont.
Then there are the things
that are equally heinous on the page and the screen, particularly the “comic
relief” characters. First and worst are a pair of gay chefs played
by Michael Molheren and Adam LeFevre in a manner that suggests most of
the homosexuals they know are 1970's TV characters. Brian Hooks fills
the quota for a Wacky Black Guy as an incompetent henchman of Bigg Bunny's,
just in case anyone in the audience thinks “Man, this movie sucks but at
least it's got a Wacky Black Guy”. The film exhaustively lays out
the thought process behind the treasure hunt (treasure and history buffs
will probably like this part better than I did), but because we have no
chance to play along and the characters are only ever in danger when BB
and his henchmen show up every half hour or so waving their guns, the story
doesn't have the forward momentum it needs.
For all this, the movie chugs
along in an agreeable enough manner because the story doesn't grate, it
just doesn't work. McConaughey and Hudson are both fine individually,
they just don't spark together. And there IS legitimate father/daughter
chemistry between Sutherland and Dziena, whose awkwardness and distrust
is compelling in a way the manufactured foibles of the stars aren't.
Dziena, who I remember from the TV series Invasion, has a gift for
sympathetic vulnerability and here she does far more with a Paris Hilton-inspired
heiress idiot character than we have any right to expect. And it's
really nice to see Sutherland underplay someone who doesn't seem like such
a bad guy. Winstone is also a gruff treat as a character who doesn't
get nearly enough screen time.
Director Tennent is a proven
crowd-pleaser with hits like Hitch, Sweet Home Alabama and
Ever After to his credit; here he's working harder to keep his audience
happy than to stage anything worth being happy about. This is one
of those movies that ends with a flash-forward to a big celebration where
everybody's So! Damn! Happy! they can't stand it, including
two characters who haven't even shared a line during the film snuggling
together to let us know they “got together”. I freely admit to having
loved many similarly shameless films, but Fool's Gold feels as pointless
as it is desperate, and strongly suggests that Kate and Matthew should
allow that divorce to remain final. |
