Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

Slow cruise to nowhere

Matthew McConaughey’s career has always intrigued me because its trajectory has gone so hard against the usual arc. Instead of starting small and gathering buzz on the way up to the A-list, he made a huge splash very early — then quickly slid into middling irrelevance, where’s he’s been stuck ever since.

After a handful of small parts in the early ’90s, he got his big break in 1996 as the righteous lawyer in “A Time to Kill.” He nailed that role to such a degree that many reviewers, myself included, favorably compared him to a young Paul Newman.

But his resume since then is heavy on unremarkable action-adventure flicks (“Sahara,” “U-571,” “Two For the Money” — although “Reign of Fire” was cool) and negligible romantic comedies (“The Wedding Planner,” “Tiptoes,” “Failure to Launch”).

To this tepid list we can now add “Fool’s Gold,” a hybrid that crosses both genres while breaking no new ground in either — an action-adventure-rom-com without nearly enough of any of those ingredients.

And this despite the casting of the appealing Kate Hudson, who has comedic talent but seems to have hit her own wall and is now stuck in the same low gear.

This is their second film together, following 2003’s “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” — a worrisome sign that someone in Hollywood may have hatched the misguided idea to package them as some sort of post-Millennial Tracy and Hepburn.

Um … no.

McConaughey’s Ben “Finn” Finnegan is among the hoarier film archetypes — the charming, roguish, footloose-and-fancy-free, happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care, ne’er-do-well dreamer-schemer.

He’s an arrested adolescent with a ramshackle boat (named “Booty Calls,” naturally) who is searching for a fortune in Spanish treasure lost in the Caribbean in 1715.

Hudson is his wife, Tess, who as the film opens is on the verge of finalizing a divorce after wasting years supporting Finn’s fruitless endeavors and itching to get on with her life.

Director Andy Tennant, who also co-wrote the script with John Claflin and Daniel Zelman, takes the long, slow route to set up the plot, pulling in various characters and slathering on unnecessary exposition to pad what is, at its core, a pretty thin premise.

There’s Kevin Hart as a Caribbean rapper named Bigg Bunny (most recent hit: “Call Me Thumper”), who starts out bankrolling Finn but soon becomes his adversary.

There’s Ray Winstone as Moe, Finn’s one-time mentor, who is now at odds with his former protégé for reasons that are never really made clear.

And there’s Donald Sutherland as Nigel Honeycutt, a very fat cat with a massive yacht who signs onto Finn’s quest, along with his spoiled, bubble-headed daughter Gemma (Alexis Dziena).

Tennant languidly nudges these characters around for a good 90 minutes while throwing out various plot threads to try to keep the film treading water.

The most superfluous of these is the estranged relationship between Nigel and Gemma. Does the remotest possibility exist that anyone will be going to this film to see Donald Sutherland?

Through it all, McConaughey — doffing his shirt as often as he can get away with — and Hudson meander along, playing the tired will-they/won’t-they game but striking few romantic sparks; they don’t even touch until three-quarters of the way into the film.

Almost all the “action,” such as it is, crams into the final 20 minutes, and it’s strictly by-the-numbers fare.

McConaughey reportedly has five more films in the pipe this year and next; lucky for him that six-pack abs and chiseled pecs can still sustain an acting career.

That doesn’t change the fact that “Fool’s Gold” bobs in the vast, swirling eddy of films that slide out of your head before you even slide out of the octoplex.