Fool's Gold

Andy Tennant’s Caribbean treasure-hunt comedy uses ‘Romancing the Stone’ as a rough template for Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey to rub each other up as a recently divorced couple whose obsession with a sunken eighteenth-century Spanish galleon full of golden booty is reignited when McConaughey’s penniless Finn finds a submerged china plate bearing a Spanish inscription.

Equally broke, Hudson’s Tess now works as a deckhand for Donald Sutherland’s frightfully English billionaire Nigel Honeycutt, currently holidaying with his dim daughter aboard his super yacht. Having lost his (and Tess’s) boat to the sea in the opening credits, opportunist Finn sees a chance to rope in some help and contrives a meeting with Honeycutt, who warms to Finn’s salty charms. But just as the treasure hunt resumes, caricatured gangster Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart) gets wind of it all and throws a large spanner into the works…

We’ve all seen this kind of scenario in umpteen treasure trovers, yet what makes ‘Fool’s Gold’ at least vaguely watchable is the presence of Hudson, who shares many of her mother Goldie Hawn’s more likeable comedic skills. It’s the badly timed pratfalls that bother most: aside from one laugh-out-loud moment involving Hudson thwacking McConaughey across the head with a borrowed walking stick, they are almost universally insipid. Yes, the formulaic script is often laughable and overly convoluted; yes, it takes a while to adjust to Sutherland’s Blighty accent; and yes, Ray Winstone is badly miscast as a Yank. But, for some unfathomable reason, I succumbed to the very occasional charms of this fair, good-natured romcom adventure and left the screening in quite a good mood.