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When Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey starred together in the lovable chick flick, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, in 2003, I thought I’d seen the birth of a great new on-screen couple. They just seemed so cute together. So when I heard that they were reuniting, I figured their new movie would be chick-flick gold—but I walked out of the theater feeling like a fool.
In Fool’s Gold, the duo’s latest romantic adventure, Hudson plays Tess, an ambitious young woman who’s given up on her adventurous but slightly delusional husband, Finn (McConaughey). They’ve spent the last eight years searching for a three-hundred-year-old Spanish treasure, but she’s tired of being broke and getting nowhere, and she’s decided leave Florida (and Finn) and get on with her life.
When Finn discovers an important clue that might finally lead him to the treasure, all he needs is a new investor—since the last one tried to have him killed. So he decides to charm his way onto the yacht that Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland) has anchored nearby while he waits for his daughter, Gemma (Alexis Dziena), to join him for some father-daughter bonding.
Once Finn gets onto the yacht, he finds that Tess is already there—working as the ship’s steward. And that gives him the perfect opportunity to get the treasure and the girl.
The water that Finn and Tess explore in Fool’s Gold may be deep, but everything else about this movie is painfully shallow. The story is underdeveloped at times, skimming over details that don’t make any sense. At other times, it’s overdeveloped, going into exhausting detail about the history of the treasure—which, as it turns out, isn’t all that interesting. The film’s funny moments aren’t all that funny, and the film’s thrilling moments are actually quite dull. And the action consists of little more than a handful of goofy, slapstick fights involving cricket bats and shovels.
The characters, too, are horribly shallow—ranging from flat and uninteresting (Tess) to cliché (Kevin Hart’s rapper-thug, Bigg Bunny) to completely unbearable (Gemma). And the chemistry that Hudson and McConaughey once had is, sadly, nowhere to be found. Despite the fact that they play a divorced couple, there should still be some sort of a spark between them (especially if you’re supposed to believe that there’s still a chance for them). But they must have used up all of their sparks while making How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days—because there’s nothing here to make you feel like their characters should be together. And as for poor Donald Sutherland, he just seems embarrassed to be a part of it all, cringing through most of his lines. And I can’t blame him. I actually felt a little embarrassed to be watching it. More than that, though, I just felt bored.
Don’t be fooled by Fool’s Gold’s prospects—because it might look like a fun romantic adventure with a cute on-screen couple, but it’s really just a dull and dubious movie that isn’t even worth the price of admission.
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