Ship Of Fools
posted on Friday, March 21, 2008 in Movie Reviews
Fool's Gold feels a bit like a relic in itself. It just feels old, employing some outdated ideas. It just feels like we’ve moved past this kind of film already. Bloated, silly, and just generally bad, watching Fool’s Gold is like staying on a sinking ship. In 1715, a Spanish treasure fleet got caught in a tropical storm. 300 years later, treasure hunter Ben Finnegan is on its tail. After finding a definitive clue to its location, his investor, a small time crime lord/rapper, decides to kill him. Ben survives, however, and he tries to enlist the help of wife to find the treasure. His wife, Tess, wants nothing more to do with him, but slowly gets lured by the call of treasure. The two find a new investor in Tess’ new boss, the fabulously wealthy Nigel Honeycutt. Their quest begins anew, but Ben’s former investor doesn’t let go of things that easily.
There are many things wrong with this script, but the main problem is that it’s too long. The film gives us time to dwell on its weaknesses. It drags us along as it goes from cliché to cliché, from one predictable plot point to another. If this film was about twenty minutes shorter, perhaps we could have forgiven the complete lack of character depth, or the laughably bad dialogue, or its absolutely asinine narrative. Perhaps if the film moved more quickly through the story points that we saw coming from a mile away, it would have been a little easier to swallow, and we could have tossed it aside as just quick, harmless fun. But instead, this film makes audiences sit through an extra twenty minutes of poor filmmaking. That’s just not right.
The film feels weird all together. It feels really dated, as if it were shot in the eighties or something. It has none of the immediacy of contemporary films, none of the style or panache that has been developed over the past twenty or so years. The film has characters talking to themselves in the mirror, an awkward confession made to a character who turns out to be elsewhere, a relentless, silly island score, and other various filmmaking tropes that have been wisely phased out. The film does do well with the seascapes that their locations provide, but it would probably take an epileptic monkey with cataracts to make beaches and clear water look bad.
Matthew McConaughey has his charms, but his main use here seems to be to remain as shirtless as possible. He does have a convincing physicality that serves the film’s action sequences, but this is a pretty empty role. Kate Hudson has yet to deliver a performance that even comes close to her breakout role in Almost Famous, and it’s almost painful to see her here floundering about, messing up her delivery and generally being untalented. It’s worth mentioning Donald Sutherland, who has enough talent for the entire cast, but doesn’t get to flex his acting muscles much at all.
There just isn’t much reason to go see Fool’s Gold. It just pummels you with mediocrity at every turn, such typical Hollywood laziness and foolishness with every single scene. And it doesn’t even have the good sense to end quickly, to get out before it wears out its welcome. There is no treasure to be found here; just shiny vistas and a glossy, gorgeous cast. Fool’s gold, indeed.
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