You Baby Gorilla.

Fools Gold

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson, Donald Sutherland
Directed by: Andy Tennant
Written by: Jon Clafin, Daniel Zelman, Andy Tennant

I want to preface this by saying that no deeper meaning should be sought in the selection of Fools Gold as the first post. It's the first movie I saw in theaters since I decided to start this new blog, and that's all.

That said- I'll see pretty much anything Matthew McConaughey does. This will be the first of many admissions to questionable taste and viewing choices I'm going to make. They're admissions in name only, and certainly don't carry the typical connotation of embarrassed divulgence. I make no apologies for my taste and frankly think it's impeccable and most other people's taste blows. In this case I have an unflagging loyalty to McConaughey due to the fact that pretty much all he does with the free time and fairly substantial wealth he's accumulated from acting is get high, get naked, and sometimes get arrested doing one or both of those things. And for the most part he chooses roles where he plays the type of dude who would do/does those sort of things. Which, when you add it all up, means even when I see a shitty McConaughey movie, I'm still fairly satisfied.

Fools Gold is just such a movie. Unilaterally and inarguably a crappy movie, it was redeemed by a perfect moment of McConaughey-ness. Essentially he plays a beach bum treasure hunter who's been chasing a sunken ship full of treasure. His main source of funding for this hunt is a somewhat sketchy hip hopper type dude named Bigg Bunny. After McConaughey sinks Bunny's boat, he's had enough and decides to have McConaughey killed. So Bigg Bunny's henchmen take him out and throw him overboard tied to an anchor. He escapes (duh) but is now so far out to sea that he's stranded. He manages to float around on a cooler that was thrown overboard with him or something, but passes out from dehydration. He comes to as a speedboat pulls up with two bro's and two babes, and they yell "HEY BRO, YOU LOOK LIKE YOU COULD USE A BEER!" The bro's throw him a beer which he pounds, and the babes flash him their hooters.

I love this scene for the obvious reasons, but I love it even more so because I'd be willing to bet the farm that it was from McConaughey's actual life, and the edit came up during the first table read. The original rescue scene was probably way more boring, and then Matt was all "Dudes...writer dudes...respectfully, I think we can kick this puppy up a notch. See, I was actually lost at sea a few years ago, and right when I thought all hope was lost, this speedboat pulls up..."

The rest of the movie is pretty shitty, but primarily because Fool's Gold can never seem to decide what kind of movie it wants to be. I'd be more than content with the typical rom-com adventure romp, but it veers off into weird family drama (the father-daugther relationship between Donald Sutherland and his Paris-esque daughter) and a briefly gritty treasure hunting movie (the aggro mercenary, Bigg Bunny punching the shit out of Kate Hudson) and then the lapses into the really weak "romance" between Hudson and McConaughey. The daughter character is totally ridiculous too because they obviously included her as a one dimensional gag character and then at some point decided the movie needed more "heart" and half-assedly wrote in the whole subplot between her and Sutherland.

One of the biggest issues I had with the movie was that at multiple points a character would drop a gun in the water and then fire it moments later, sometimes even submerging the gun for a long time and shooting it off underwater. Granted, 95% of my gun knowledge comes from other stupid movies and the other 5% from going out into the woods with my friends and shooting up old computers and teevees and other garbage with AK's, so I'm not claiming to be a Navy SEAL or anything. That said, it's my general understanding that you definitely can't just take a plain old gun and swim around shooting things underwater.

Maybe I'm wrong, and if that's the case, feel free to let me know. It wouldn't be totally earth shattering to find out I'm wrong, because before I shot off the above-mentioned guns, I somehow assumed that I'd be able to see the bullet leave the barrel and follow it by eye all the way until it hit whatever I was shooting it. So it was sort of a surprise when it seemed like the Tandy monitor or whatever it was just exploded all by itself. And the closest I've come to owning a gun was when my friend Trevor and I got drunk and agreed go "go halves" on a gun or two. Which is one of the best/worst ideas I've ever had. Best if I convinced him to put the guns in his name, worst if I got my prints on them and then let Trevor have custody for the weekend. Come to think of it, I really wish I'd gone shooting in the woods more, but the only other times I thought to try and go typically tended to be in the neighborhood of 3am, and rarely in the company of anyone who was in any sort of shape to drive, much less shoot guns in the dark. I do really want to see what muzzle flash looks like in pitch black though.

So a bunch of other bullshit happens, and even though the movie runs barely an hour and a half, it runs long. I wouldn't really recommend this to anyone, because if I can't get even somewhat excited about a McConaughey movie, I really doubt ANYONE can.

1 short and curly out of 5.

Info:

-Showtimes (Fandango)
-IMDB
-Official Site

And here's the trailer.