The ads would have you believe Fool’s Gold is pure rom-com, with two sunkissed alpha babes trading patter and pratfalls on their way to renewed love, but there is more to it than that. Oh, nothing intrusive like depth or character development — those would be about as welcome here as a plea for peace in the middle of Rambo.



But you do get some pretty effective plotting, some lovely underwater footage and a race for treasure in which bad guys actually die. Theirs are non-graphic, cartoony deaths, but deaths nonetheless. So what we have isn’t mere flirtation, it’s full-on action-adventure-suspense flirtation, a sort of scuba-certified Romancing the Stone.



Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, five years to the week after their pairing in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, re-team as a freshly divorced couple thrown back together in pursuit of an 18th-century ship’s lost riches in the Bahamas. The owner of the closest island, rapper Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart), finds out about the prize and dispatches his goons to get to it first. Bunny’s a baddie, comical but thuggish enough to deserve the shovel he gets to the crotch, and the worse fate he suffers later.



Some other people get caught up in this chase, notably Donald Sutherland, slumming as a yacht owner with plummy British intonations and a regrettable, shticky scene of trying to learn diving in a little tub. This guy has a dim-bulb daughter of the Paris Hilton variety (Alexis Dziena) who becomes more empowered watching McConaughey swagger and Hudson swat people.



Fool’s Gold is gooey with eye candy. The beaches are white, the skies are an overpowering blue, the waters even bluer. McConaughey regularly goes shirtless to prove he’s kept his buff form, and single mom Hudson strips to bikinis to prove she’s rebuilt hers. The leading man is well used here, perfectly plausible as a breezy charmer blessed with nautical street smarts and a way with macking. Hudson, not so much — at times she comes off as not so much adorably neurotic as trying hard to be adorably neurotic.



And then the action’s back on, and people are kissing and running and reacting to each other’s misbehavior with the reproach “Do you mind?” A bouncy soundtrack flavored with Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley underscores most of it, the proper accompaniment to getting your groove back in such undemanding style. It’s a mindless Funjet excursion that doesn’t take as long, cost as much or leave you as sunburned.

Fool’s Gold

★★



Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson and Donald Sutherland

Director: Andy Tennant

Rated: PG-13 for action violence, some sexual material, brief nudity and

language

Theaters: Century Olympia, Lakewood Cinema 15, Lakewood Towne Center 12, Longston Place 14, Regal Martin Village 16, Yelm Cinema Prairie Park