Review: Fool’s Gold
Au PAIR
A couple goes sunken-treasure hunting in a rom-com-cum-adventure that barely manages to stay afloat.
FEB 8, 2008 - ONCE UPON A TIME, Hollywood dreck was infinitely preferable to Bollywood dreck, if only because things were better shot and designed and the possibility of stumbling upon a hero in bright orange pants was close to zero. But now, our films at least look as good as theirs, so what, really, is the incentive to walk into something like Fool’s Gold, which is every bit as sloppily written and indifferently performed as anything from Mumbai – or Chennai or Hyderabad, for that matter – that tumbles into our theatres each Friday? Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson play Finnegan and Tess (the names derived from Hardy and Joyce are about as ambitious as this film gets), who get divorced in the early reels and find themselves back together after they go hunting for an ancient treasure sunk in the Caribbean waters. Given the inevitability of their locked-lip reunion, I suppose there’s some sort of metaphor here: as they salvage diamonds and emeralds from the sea, they rediscover what was precious in their relationship. Or something like that.
But Fool’s Gold doesn’t bother to convince us that Tess and Finnegan aren’t meant for each other, before setting out to show us that they are. Early on, when our hero’s boat sinks – um, just asking, but when the craft was in running condition, did it leave behind Finnegan’s wake? – he dives underwater and retrieves a picture of him and Tess in happier days. Later, at gunpoint, some hoods (to whom he owes a lot of money) ask him if he has any last words before they make him walk the plank, and the only thing he can think of is, “Tell Tess I love her.” What is this if not shorthand that this seaman’s barque is worse than his bite, that he isn’t as bad as his soon-to-be ex-wife is making him out to be? As for Tess, she mumbles something about wanting to go back to school and teach, far away from her loser husband, and we smirk because there’s no way that’s going to happen, considering her non-stop reminiscing about the incredible sex they had and how easily she slips back into bonding with him post-divorce. So where’s the knotty romantic tension we’re dying to see resolved?
And as if one deadweight dysfunctional relationship weren’t enough to drag down something meant to pass for light entertainment, there’s another – between millionaire Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland) and his airhead-Barbie daughter Gemma (Alexis Dziena). Sutherland shows signs of developing into an amusingly crackpot character when he asks Tess (who’s a steward on his yacht) why she’s heading to shore. “Married, are you getting?” he wonders. But any further opportunities of Yodaspeak are quashed under needlessly heavy revelations attempting to get at the root of his issues with his daughter, though Dziena saves this subplot from becoming too soggy by tossing off a few mildly-funny dumb lines. To get a sense of all the wasted opportunity here, you only have to remember something like Romancing the Stone, whose rom-com-meets-action-adventure tone director Andy Tennant tries to grasp in vain. He fares marginally better when the focus is off his leads and on the sunken treasure, and he does manage a reasonably diverting climax – but in general, his film is itself a bit of a wreck.
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“stumbling upon a hero in bright orange pants”….wait, this is a drawback to our cinema? ha ha, i say it’s what makes bollywood (and tollywood, etc, etc) so endearingly enticing!
great review as usual. and thanks for pointing out that hollywood churns out just as much crap if not more than mumbai does. as you said, crap in a shiny package is still…crap.
I know, I know I promised to stay away but
1) that applied for repeating myself
2) plus consistency is the virtue of the small mind.
In the best Rocky tradition, all I want to say is I pity the reviewer(replace with stronger noun according to taste
) who finds a class screenplay/direction/editing display like “Sunday” brainless. 
SB: Still, there was way too much colour in menswear in the nineties
G: Uh, okay.
Hey,
I really do hope you get something from my persistent abuse of you as a scratching post to blunt my claws.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. (Emerson)
And I have cynically sold out.
So until I once again decide to say “Fuck you” to society, the fact is, we are too alike for me to ignore you and we differ on too much that is important to me for me to ignore you.
Literature is an escape from life; and the literature of mystifications reflects an age in which we have, most of us, determined to give up the riddle of the universe. The indefatigable human intellect still bids us speculate whence we came, why we are here, whether life is worth living, how it ought to be lived, and what it is all about, any way. It would never do (would it?) to let this curiosity - complex get the better of us. It might lead us to the most surprising, nay, to the most awkward conclusions. We must arrange, then, a transference; as Aristotle bade us purge ourselves of pity and fear by the stage representation of them, so we must get rid of our tiresome inquisitiveness by diverting it into safe channels. Now, why was it that the cake of soap remained untouched, although the bath had plainly been used? Let us give our brains to the problem.(Ronald Knox)
Cheers!
G
You have the great misfortune to be Baby Bear and not Mama Bear or Papa Bear. Not too different, not too similiar. JUST right for Goldilocks.
I sense a Bollywood remake of this film is in the works…
The film got shredded by the critics in US too!! It might become a hit!!
Did you review Dharm? I would like to know if it is a really good movie or a ‘water’esque movie.
Ravi K: Somehow I don’t quite see this working in Bollywood. Then again, when has that ever stopped us from trying?
Shankar: What’s that? The law of Inverse Proportionality?
s: I haven’t, but Jabberwock has a nice review on his blog.
Brangan, don’t discount the Law of Inverse Proportionality. Meet the Spartans debuted at number 1 and got 3% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
Similarly “National Treasure”, certainly not a classic, was on top of the box-office charts for weeks and raked in the moolah, even though it was roundly criticised by all. There is something about the adventure-rom-com genre films that seem to make money, inspite of being bad!!
I told you!!
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/02/10/boxoffice.ap/index.html
I guess it’s also a dearth of good movies right now!!
BR
U used to do those wonderful music reviews, i dont see that anymore, i was waitin for ur reveiw of Jodha Akbar.
Also, u have not been doing some Tamil movie reviews.
Kindly do those too, waiting for it.
RC: There’s a post on the music of JA in Between Reviews: The Mughal Ear. About Tamil films, it’s just the time factor…