BEFORE: Matthew McConaughey carries over again from "The Beach Bum", and this marks his fourth appearance so far this year. It's also the fourth appearance for Donald Sutherland, and also Kevin Hart, but this sort of thing will sort itself out at the end of the year, as it always does. I'm focusing on McConaughey this week, and in this section of the year he should make it to 7 films, which is respectable, and then during October I'm planning to watch "The Dark Tower", which should bring him up to eight.
If you're keeping track at home, that will force a tie between him and Robert De Niro, Maya Rudolph, and Owen Wilson. As I approach the 2/3 completion marker for the year, these actors seem to be competing for the top spot this year. But, there are still 100 films to go, and a lot of actors have four or five appearances already - another mini-chain featuring someone like, say, Glenn Close, and these front-runners could be overtaken. Or, someone could emerge as the front-runner after the Summer Music Concerts & Documentary chain, somebody like Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney who often make appearances via archive footage. Or, if I watch all five "Twilight" movies in October, any actor who's in the entire series gets a 5-film bump very late in the year, for a potential come-from-behind victory.
I'm probably more excited than you are to find out who's going to win this year, and I'm resisting the urge to total up appearances in the unwatched films to find out.
THE PLOT: A new clue to the whereabouts of a lost treasure rekindles a married couple's sense of adventure - and their estranged romance.
AFTER: This is the third of three McConaughey films in a row with a maritime or beach theme, much of the action in "Serenity", "The Beach Bum" and this one take place on boats or beaches, and I had to organize them in some way - but it's also a nice coincidence that summer's really kicked in now post July 4. Did anything nautical or Caribbean-related happen on this day in history? On July 10, 1499, Portuguese explorer Nicolau Coelho returned to Lisbon, after discovering the sea route to India with Vasco de Gama. On July 10, 1973, the Bahamas gained full independence, and on July 10, 1985, the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior was bombed by French agents and sunk in Auckland harbor. And on July 10, 2011, the Russian cruise ship Bulgaria sank in the Volga River, Russia's worst maritime disaster since 1986. (OK, there's a bit of a tie-in there, since this film begins with the accidental sinking of the boat that the lead character's using to search for treasure...)
But I'm a day late right now, I started watching this film on Friday July 10 and had to finish it on Saturday, after a trip out to Long Island where my wife bought cigarettes and we had our first INDOOR restaurant meal since March. Our first choice of restaurant wasn't open, perhaps because they're doing outdoor dining and the weather report today called for thunderstorms and heavy rain, but then things changed. So we had to go to one of our back-up L.I. restaurants, and they were serving indoors, while still observing the new necessary protocols (one-time use paper menus, wait staff in masks, cleaning all tables between uses). The reason I'm a day behind is that I fell asleep last night, about halfway through the film - admittedly I did have two beers on Friday when I came home, and also had a two-hour conversation with my BFF before starting the film, but mostly I blame the film for not holding my attention.
The problem here is that you'd expect a film about searching for treasure to be exciting, and this one just isn't. It's tedious, there's a lot more talking about looking for and finding treasure than there is, umm, looking for and finding treasure. There's plenty of action, the different factions searching the ocean often get violent with each other, there are fist-fights and shootings and a few people get knocked out with shovels - but to what end? All that's no substitute for DOING STUFF that gets our heroes closer to the treasure, because if you're mostly talking about it, then you're not DOING it. I heard this story about the Spanish galleons sailing for Spain and then encountering a hurricane so many damn times, and each time it just kept getting longer and longer, with more details, and who the hell cares, just get out there and start finding the clues already!
First, we also have to watch as married couple Finn and Tess consciously uncouple, because he's still searching for this treasure and she's so over it, she wants to hold him to his promise to return to Chicago, and apparently he meant that he would...eventually. So she's been saving up enough money for a divorce lawyer by working on a yacht for some multi-millionaire (Donald Sutherland doing a terrible British accent, for the duration of the film.). Meanwhile Finn's kept the financing for his treasure hunt coming by taking money from a rapper who owns the nearby island, and the loss of his boat suggests that he's not going to be able to keep the search going, so the rapper wants results, or his money back, or Finn's head on a plate. He prefers the latter, and Finn is thrown overboard in chains, but manages to escape and get back to land, just in time for his divorce hearing. Hey, he's a busy guy.
But Finn also manages to find half of a broken plate, which he believes came from the galleon that they're all looking for - so he manages to convince the multi-millionaire and his horribly entitled daughter to use his yacht to go back and resume the search. Only the rapper has hired another treasure hunter, Finn's old mentor, and the competition is on. Hey, maybe if we recount everything we know about the sinking of that ship for the tenth time, we'll notice some small detail that we ignored the previous nine times. Well, it's worth a try anyway, but won't that be boring for everyone in the audience, to hear the whole story yet again? Yes, I suppose it will.
At one point during the production of this film, the shoot was delayed by an infestation of deadly box jellyfish, which prevented the stars from doing swimming scenes. It's almost like the jellyfish knew something that the crew didn't, and were trying to prevent the film from being completed. Noble jellyfish, we appreciate your efforts, even if they were in vain. Ultimately this was better than "The Beach Bum", because the narrative did have an arc, and a proper ending, but ultimately it's neither here nor there, not good enough to be great and not bad enough to be terrible. And gee, I wonder if working together to find the treasure will somehow get these crazy divorced kids back together again. (Of course it will, but this is obviously unrealistic, they may be successful in their efforts to find treasure, but that's not likely to fix the other problems inherent in their marriage, right?)
Also starring Kate Hudson (last seen in "You, Me and Dupree"), Donald Sutherland (last heard in "Lord of War"), Alexis Dziena (last seen in "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist"), Ray Winstone (last seen in "King Arthur"), Kevin Hart (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Ewen Bremner (last seen in "The Rundown"), Brian Hooks, David Roberts (last seen in "Unbroken"), Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Michael Mulheren, Adam LeFevre (last seen in "House of D"), Rohan Nichol (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Roger Sciberras, Duncan Young, Luke Pegler (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Xavier Fernandez, Peter Whitford, Laurence Coy (last seen in "San Andreas"), Linda Cropper.
RATING: 5 out of 10 search grids
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