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'Fool's Gold': Adventure Comedy is Sunk

By Daniel Montgomery

Friday, February 8, 2008

‘Fool’s Gold’, or ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Moron’. As a critic, I should probably avoid cheap puns like that, but this film inspires me. ‘Displeasure Island’. ‘Ship-drecked’. ‘The Groan to El Dorado’. I’ve got a million of these.

In ‘Fool’s Gold’, Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey reunite for the first time since ‘How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days’ —was there a great demand for a reunion after ‘How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days’? Hudson plays Tess, who works as a steward on a yacht to pay for her education. McConaughey plays Finn, a professional parasite; Tess explains that all Finn knows how to do is hunt for treasure and weasel money out of people to pay for hunting for treasure. He’s also good at having sex, of which she keeps reminding us. She divorces him in Key West, but somehow he convinces her to resume their hunt for a treasure they sought out for most of their marriage.

The treasure is called the Queen’s Dowry, and its backstory is so convoluted that it’s explained first in the opening titles and then again in a scene devoted entirely to spelling it out. Usually, a screenplay will try to integrate its exposition into the story, but there is no such attempt here. Writers John Claflin, Daniel Zelman, and Andy Tennant reveal it all at once by having Tess and Finn regale Tess’s boss, a kindly rich man named Nigel (Donald Sutherland), with a story of 17th Century family honor and sunken ships. It all comes out in a confusing jumble of details, names, and secrets, and we’re left to ask questions like, “What good is a dowry if it’s buried where no one can get it?” What’s more, this sweeping tale of adventure on the high seas, confusing as it is, is far more interesting than any of the characters on screen — they made the wrong movie.

Don’t ask me why, but racing against them to find the treasure is a notorious rap star named Bigg Bunny D (Kevin Hart). It would take a tough man to live down a dumb nickname like that, even in the age of Bow Wow and Ludacris — Ludacris! Now that would have been creative casting — and indeed we learn that Bigg Bunny murdered a rival and was acquitted because he killed all the witnesses. But how could this be true? Over the course of the story, he fires a gun repeatedly, but he never hits anything. He keeps trying to kill Finn, but never succeeds, and when you’re being outwitted by Finn, it’s time to hang it up.

Why does Bigg Bunny want the treasure? He’s rich enough to own an island, which suggests the kind of wealth where a king’s ransom is what you find between the seat cushions. A Queen’s Dowry might not even cover the henchmen’s salaries. I suppose a film like this needs a villain for the main characters to unite against, to facilitate their reconciliation, and all the more interesting bad guys with private islands are busy aiming electro-rays at James Bond or Superman. In lieu of a white cat, Bunny pets his furry namesake with menace.

Co-writer Tennant also directs, and at first his film is at least watchable in its sun-baked goofiness, until an overlong finale where he confuses his movie for Indiana Jones. The score is by George Fenton, a five-time Oscar nominee and the composer of the brilliant music for the Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth miniseries. For most of the film, you’d never guess his pedigree; he’s wasted supplying generic dum-dee-dum music meant to underscore broad comedy like a Saturday morning cartoon. By the end, he’s trying too hard, and his grand adventure orchestrations only remind us that this film and its heroes don’t deserve his effort.

There is a peanut gallery of sidekicks and comic relief, like Nigel’s daughter Gemma (Alexis Dziena), who is so dim that I worry her mother huffed glue while pregnant; if Nigel were responsible and not so amiably permissive, he would have had her tested for developmental disorders. There are a pair of gay chefs who fawn over Finn’s “raw sexuality,” a Ukranian flunkey, and the formidable Ray Winstone (of ‘The Departed’ and ‘The Proposition’), accepting what I hope was a very large paycheck to play an experienced seaman named Moe. In his best scene, Moe punches Finn in the face. Moe is my hero.