Fool's Gold

I'm afraid I gave up on the whole thing during the opening credits when Finn and his Ukrainian buddy Alfonz (Ewen Bremner) manage to sink their boat while swimming under it, hardly noticing when it crashes down to the bottom of the ocean next to them. I figured at that point the movie was heading for grief, and I wasn't far wrong. Finn could easily have taken his place among the Three Stooges if he'd been born a half a dozen decades earlier.

"Fool's Gold" is not awful by any means, and it's certainly good-natured enough. It's just so lightweight, with so pedestrian a treasure conflict and so uninvolving a romance that there's not a lot to care about. In fact, the thing I enjoyed most was the background music by Bob Marley and the Wailers, among others. When you like a movie's music more than its story or characters, you know the thing's in trouble.

Video:
At least the colors in this 2.40:1-ratio, VC-1, 1080p, BD25 transfer sparkle. There were times during the standard-definition presentation when things got a bit too dark and oversaturated, but not here. Inner detailing in darker areas of the screen is reasonably good, especially when the contrasts are as vivid as they are. Although these contrasts do tend to highlight the video's more garish qualities, the effect is never excessive. Object definition is OK, although it's rather soft and lacking in ultimate sharpness. With grain also a nonissue, I suspect that Warners may have applied a degree of filtering to achieve their clean screen. In any case, the results, smooth and agreeable, are better in high definition than in standard def, even if that's still not saying a lot.

Audio:
Warner Bros. have chosen to include only a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track on this disc, nothing lossless, which for an action film seems odd, unless they didn't have room for it. I hope this isn't a trend, though, if only for the PR value that a lossless soundtrack like Dolby TrueHD provides a release. Anyway, the DD 5.1 has a fairly wide front-channel stereo spread and an abundance of subtle but effective rear-channel noises like the sounds of waves, rain, wind, bullets, rippling water, and the ambient bloom of the musical track. Most important, the sound, like the video, is pleasantly warm and natural, making it easy to listen to, if not very thrilling. I'm taking a point off its overall score, though, for not making any discernable improvement over its standard-definition counterpart.

Extras:
As with the standard-definition disc, there isn't much going on in the BD's special features department. The two major items are brief and inconsequential. "Fool's Gold: Flirting with Adventure" is a behind-the-scenes promo lasting a little over four minutes, and a gag reel is a little under three minutes. That's it. There are twenty-five scene selections; English, French, and Spanish spoken languages; French and Spanish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.

Parting Shots:
"Fool's Gold" puts forth a bundle of energy but doesn't pay off with as much entertainment value as it could, maybe because everything we see is so predictable. We know pretty much from the outset how it's all going to turn out, even from one scene to the next, but I suppose we should expect that of any traditional genre film. It's just that this one tries too hard with too little, extending sequences that aren't very good to begin with and then just piling on more. Lord knows, it wants us to like it, and maybe with its sparkling high-definition picture that's enough for people only interested in the movie's visuals.

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