By Darel Jevens

The ads would have you believe “Fool’s Gold” is pure rom-com, with two sunkissed alpha babes trading patter and pratfalls on their way to renewed love, but there is more to it than that. Oh, nothing intrusive like depth or character development — those would be about as welcome here as a plea for peace in the middle of “Rambo.”

But you do get some pretty effective plotting, some lovely underwater footage and a race for treasure in which bad guys actually die. Theirs are non-graphic, cartoony deaths, but deaths nonetheless. So what we have isn’t mere flirtation, it’s full-on action-adventure-suspense flirtation, a sort of scuba-certified “Romancing the Stone.”

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Alexis Dziena plays the Blackberry-wielding, “celebutante” daughter of billionaire Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland) in the romantic comedy “Fool’s Gold.” The pair are convinced to go on an adventure in search of Spanish treasure. 

Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, five years to the week after their pairing in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” reteam as a freshly divorced couple thrown back together in pursuit of an 18th-century ship’s lost riches in the Bahamas. The owner of the closest island, rapper Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart), finds out about the prize and dispatches his goons to get to it first. Bunny’s a baddie, comical but thuggish enough to deserve the shovel he gets to the crotch, and the worse fate he suffers later.

Some other people get caught up in this chase, notably Donald Sutherland, slumming as a yacht owner with plummy British intonations and a regrettable, shticky scene of trying to learn diving in a little tub. This guy has a dim-bulb daughter of the Paris Hilton variety (Alexis Dziena) who becomes more empowered watching McConaughey swagger and Hudson swat people.

“Fool’s Gold” is gooey with eye candy. The beaches are white, the skies are an overpowering blue, the waters even bluer. McConaughey regularly goes shirtless to prove he’s kept his buff form, and single mom Hudson strips to bikinis to prove she’s rebuilt hers. The leading man is well used here, perfectly plausible as a breezy charmer blessed with nautical street smarts and a way with macking. Hudson, not so much — at times she comes off as not so much adorably neurotic as trying hard to be adorably neurotic.

There’s a lot of storytelling going on here, and you can picture the screenwriters diagramming their jolts of excitement and their ebbs and flows of mood. But you appreciate their effort. And then just when your short attention span is acclimated, the whole thing slows for an elaborate, convoluted shipboard explanation of the treasure’s origin that goes on for at least five talky minutes. On the print I saw, the words “Take Bathroom Break” had not yet been superimposed.

And then the action’s back on, and people are kissing and running and reacting to each other’s misbehavior with the reproach “Do you mind?” A bouncy soundtrack flavored with Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley underscores most of it, the proper accompaniment to getting your groove back in such undemanding style. It’s a mindless Funjet excursion that doesn’t take as long, cost as much or leave you as sunburned.

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Darel Jevens is entertainment editor for The Chicago Sun-Times.