Film

Like watching blond eight-year-olds play a game of Clue, Fool’s Gold will have you seriously wondering if it was a film made for adults. A sunken-treasure mystery, it’s also a romantic comedy, terms that become arbitrary when you’re talking about Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. Odd: Both actors, specimens of good health and genes, have been charming in an earlier millennium. But paired together (as some might dimly remember from 2003’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days), they create a masterful spell of blandness, an antichemistry that only doting parents could love.

As skin-deep skin divers bronzed by the Florida sun but about to terminate a marriage forged primarily in the sack, the stars come off as the shallowest protagonists since the last Girls Gone Wild video. Nevertheless, Finn (McConaughey), a scamp, scoundrel and rogue (do you see how unbearably cute this is?) has his dreams—and he just may have discovered a chipped piece of flatware belonging to a downed ship loaded with royal gold. Tess (Hudson), who flirts with her freedom from Finn like a bored temp, is quickly sucked in, though the duo will have competition from gun-happy thugs and Finn’s craggy old boss (Winstone, cashing the check).

Critically speaking, Hollywood is coming off one of its strongest years in memory. But it still has room for the likes of director Andy Tennant (Hitch), as careless a hired gun as they come, comfortable with “Mickey Mouse” comedy music and soggy clichés. The final showdown occurs at a reef-encrusted “blowhole”—there’s a term you’ll come to understand intimately.