Movie Review: Fool's Gold (2008)

Fool's Gold is an aptly titled flick because you are a fool if you spend your gold on this trashy travesty of an alleged major motion picture. Its like an extended version of a bad television situation comedy come to the big screen. Fool's Gold is filled with all sorts of alleged humor in the form of jokes and crazy stunts that all fall flat comedy wise.

Basically, Fool's Gold plays like an extended episode of Three's Company except for the added perversion and an idiotic adventure element involving lost Spanish treasure from the 18th Century. In this movie, the character equivalents of Jack and Chrissy have a bad argument, fight, then get confused. In a daze, they go to the local bar where they encounter the landlord, his wife and the landlord's goofy friends. Yes, its as bad as this sounds.

Fool's Gold stars Matthew McConaughey as Ben Finn Finnegan, a likeable if incompetent treasure hunter. His obsession with finding Spanish treasure has led to the dissolving of practically his entire life including his marriage to Tess (Kate Hudson). Fortunately, Tess is able to get hired by the eccentric millionaire Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland) and Ben Finn is able to persuade the man who hired his former wife to bankroll his adventures in the deep blue sea looking for long lost gold. Complicating matters is Honeycutt's voluptuous daughter Gemma (Alexis Dziena) who is out to seduce Ben Finn. A further complication is that there is an evil rap music star named Cordell (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) who also has ambitions regarding the Spanish treasure. Cordell has hired an evil treasure hunter named Fitch (Ray Winstone) to find the treasure first and this duplicitious duo are determined stop Benn Finn at all costs.

At first glance, this seems like a promising scenario for an exciting action thriller. However, the execution of this outline into a decent movie proved too much for the filmmakers. The movie creators were clearly aiming for a sitcom type flick and added the adventure stuff simply for padding to get the movie to feature length. How else to explain the failure of this flick to really get into full gear with the treasure hunt and related action?

The direction by Andy Tennant falls well short of Tennant's usual work. All too many scenes in Fool's Gold drag on and on to the boredom of the audience. The acting is uniformly bad with both Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey turning in what may well be their all time worst performances. The music is lackluster. This movie's only saving grace is the excellent cinematography by Hollywood veteran Don Burgess.

In the end, Fool's Gold is a movie to avoid like the plague.