Movie review: 'Fountain of Youth' lacks spirit of adventure

UPI

22-05-2025

1 of 5 | From left to right, Eiza Gonzalez, John Krasinski and Natalie Portman star in "Fountain of Youth," on Apple TV+ May 23. Photo courtesy of Apple TV+
LOS ANGELES, May 22 (UPI) -- Fountain of Youth, on Apple TV+ Friday, aspires to the sort of globe-trotting mythical adventures of Indiana Jones, and in turn the adventures that inspired him. Despite an A-list ensemble and international locations, Fountain is merely insincere mimicry.
Luke Purdue (John Krasinski) is an adventurer who explores foreign lands and steals their treasures. He is introduced in a Bangkok street chase evading gangsters who want the artifact he stole.
Luke visits England where his sister, Charlotte (Natalie Portman) is getting divorced. Her job as a museum curator gives Luke an in to steal a Rembrandt looking for a clue to the Fountain of Youth.
Charlotte reluctantly follows Luke on his quest, working with his team of Deb (Carman Ejogo) and Murph (Laz Alonso), all working for billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson). Esme (Eiza Gonzalez) is on their tail trying to prevent them from finding the Fountain, and at one point Charlotte brings her son, Thomas (Benjamin Chivers) along.
Indiana Jones is the gold standard of this kind of worldwide adventure for mythical treasures, but even Indiana Jones doesn't live up to that standard anymore. 1999's The Mummy got close but even its sequels devolved into intangible special effects.
Fountain of Youth doesn't even get that close as it immediately gets off on the wrong foot. While it is welcome to see sequences filmed on location, Luke drives around Bangkok streets and runs through markets with no energy.
Director Guy Ritchie likes to put a camera under Krasinski's chin or turn the camera upside down, but those are old tricks now. They don't build into any sort of momentum.
When the film slows down to let Luke talk, it fumbles further. Krasinski has been a convincing action hero in Jack Ryan and 13 Hours, but in trying to embody the carefree matinee idol, he turns Luke into a sociopath.
When the siblings reunite, Charlotte insists she's the one who had to grow up, implying that he did not. Luke chastises her for giving up on dreams and the journey to fulfill those dreams.
Those are tired cliches in their best applications but Luke has only shown himself to break the law, cost his innocent sister her livelihood and abdicate his familial responsibility.
Looking back on Krasinski's trademark character, Jim from The Office may think he's the hero but part of the joke is that he's working as meaningless a job as anyone. Applying that persona to an actual action hero shows the limits of that charm.
It's all well and good to impress the secretary by making fun of the boss, but it's not so funny when Luke is endangering lives, even though the movie and the genre imply that all the good guys will be safe.
Furthermore, the push and pull of attraction and antagonism with Esme knows what it's supposed to do but can't pull it off. When Luke comments on "the exotic aroma of danger" when Esme arrives, it's hardly a clever dig, let alone seductive.
The characters give the slightest art history lesson to incorporate a bit of Da Vinci Code into the adventure.
In addition to Thailand, the production actually filmed in Egypt so at least they did not fake the adventure on a green screen. A sequence of raising the purser's strong room of the RMS Lusitania from the ocean depths looks like they actually used underwater models and built a set for the portion brought to the surface.
The adventure climaxes in a temple that requires solving puzzles to unlock passageways. While the design harkens back to Indiana Jones's greatest explorations, it loses its magic when the temple cannot possibly be a physical set.
Seemingly endless flights of steps emerge from the walls meaning it's just a digital background. To be fair, the actors are in some chambers with falling pillars, so at least it was a blend of physical and digital work.
Alas, the climax erupts into machine gun fire without the flare of modern gunplay movies like John Wick or Extraction. The drawn out reveal of the treasure is entirely predictable, not just because it is exactly the same as The Last Crusade but because it is poorly constructed and interminably elongated.
It's hard to tell if the modern-day setting itself was a mistake, as all it adds is a few technological toys. The Indiana Jones and Mummy series knew that setting the adventure in the past made the adventurers themselves as mythic as the artifacts they pursued.
Setting Fountain of Youth in the past wouldn't solve the issues that debunk the heroes' delusions of grandeur.
Also, Esme checks in with her boss, played by Stanley Tucci, who appears briefly over an hour into the movie. If his character was important enough to be played by Tucci he probably should have been more involved with the mission.
The end teases further adventures the cast and filmmakers would surely like to have. Hopefully, Fountain of Youth will disappear into streaming obscurity and spare any further exploits.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.