Fool's Gold (Blu-ray Disc)

Fool's Gold is crap and I can't believe everyone from Kate Hudson on down to the grips doesn't know it. There are problems all over the place, but the main problem is too much going on in a story that actually goes nowhere. That may seem impossible, but they managed it. Director Andy Tennant introduces us to a fleet of characters, many of which serve such a small purpose in the story that it's amazing he just didn't axe their scenes. At 112 minutes long Fool's Gold is at least 22 minutes too long. Instead of having no deleted scenes in the special features column there should have been complete characters lost to the cutting room floor.

I have heard people say that Kate Hudson has killed her career since 2005's Skeleton Key, but I would have to take it even back two more and say since How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days she has lost all box-office credibility, and based on the poster for My Best Friend's Girl, in which she stars with Dane Cook of all people, she is looking to continue the trend. Co-star Matthew McConaughey can't really say he has done much better since the 2003 rom-com that first saw he and Hudson teamed up. While Failure to Launch did quite well with audiences it bombed with critics and We are Marshall was terrible.

Yup, Kate and Matt need a career makeover and Fool's Gold didn't manage to do anything other than make it look even worse. Here they star as a dysfunctional couple searching for a mysterious fortune lost in the Caribbean. This is a story that would have worked on its own without the rich business man played by Donald Sutherland, his air head daughter, the gay cooks, the rapper Bigg Bunny, Bigg Bunny's henchmen, the assassin hired to kill Kate and Matt, Ray Winstone as a competing hunter and his crew. This is what I am talking about when I say too many people and I almost forgot Ewan Bremner as the bumbling Ukrainian assistant. Yeah, not a lot of laughs there.

One stat I would love to see are how well films that were shot in tropical locations tend to do. It always seems to me that when movies head out to shoot in island setting such as the Caribbean or Hawaii the film's just fail miserably. I don't know if it is due to a lack of attention and a focus on soaking up the sun or what, but it just seems to be the case.

As for the rest of this Blu-ray release you get a gag reel that entails watching people laugh for four minutes and a featurette that almost seems like a joke in and of itself considering it is obviously generic and is called "Flirting with Adventure: The McConaughey-Hudson Chemistry". You would think with a title like that we would be getting into some serious bits of information, but no, nothing here either.

This movie is just a mess from stem to stern. It actually could have been good had they simplified it a bit, but too many characters were introduced into too small of a story and it all went to shit from there.