Joe Waters and Gus Green are bumbling, blue-collar, yet happy best friends and next door neighbors who live modestly in Newark, New Jersey and have known each other since childhood.

They share the hobby of fishing and win a stay in the Florida Everglades to go angling, but promise to return home in time for Thanksgiving.

Joe and Gus are forced to push their boat down the road until they are met by two women, Rita and Angie, who are after Martin and offer them a lift.

Joe and Gus stay at a trailer park for the night, and while watching a documentary on television, they learn that Martin is actually Dekker Massey, a wanted criminal who has conned several women out of their riches and is implied to have stabbed his last victim to death and hidden her money and jewelry somewhere.

At gunpoint, Dekker forces them to push Joe's car into the swamp and ties them up inside a sheriff's office, intending to flee the country with the treasure.

After a long chase across the swamp, Joe and Gus find and capture Dekker moments before his escape via plane and hand him over to the police.

John G. Avildsen was set to direct and had already filmed it for the first two weeks, but he was fired from Disney and paid his $2 million salary to the studio; Christopher Cain immediately signed on to replace him.

The site's critics consensus reads: "Sloppy, formulaic, and unfunny, Gone Fishin' marks a painful low point in the careers of its two talented leads".

Film critic Chris Hicks of the Salt Lake Tribune said after Gone Fishin' and 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag that "the Academy should have asked Pesci to return the Oscar he had won for Goodfellas".

[9] The film also received two nominations at the 1997 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards: Most Painfully Unfunny Comedy and Worst Actor for Pesci.