Fountain of Youth

What in the hell are we doing here? $180 million movies that have no aspiration other than running some trailers with some bankable stars to entice users to maybe purchase a month of streaming on their service. It’s cynical and gross, frankly. Because Fountain of Youth is a deeply cynical and gross movie on so many fronts. It’s ChatGPT “Write me an action movie in the vein of the Indiana Jones series and National Treasure but stupider.” And then hand it to Guy Ritchie, the maestro of chaos and obfuscation. My god, the more I think about this thing, the more horrified I am at what a trope-y mess it was. And John Krasinski and Natalie Portman as mismatched, odd couple siblings? The man is a giant 6’3″ goy. She is a tiny Jewess. That is some laughable casting. But, honestly, someone could have put more than the five minutes it took the faceless Apple TV+ monolith to ask Apple’s Jack Ryan and whatever Portman’s name was in the Apple series, Lady in the Lake, to come on over for a bag ‘o’ cash and the movie still would have been a stinker.

Have you played Uncharted? Or seen the godawful movie adaptation starring one Tom Holland? Well, if you have, you know Krasinski’s Luke Purdue character. Of course Uncharted is basically just a more swashbuckling, thieving and murder-y version of Indiana Jones. So Fountain of Youth is like three times removed from the art-stealing, globetrotting rascal. That Luke, he’s a scoundrel. Going to foreign lands and walking away with their treasures. His sister, Charlotte, however, learned a different lesson from their adventurer, art-loving dad. She’s a museum curator! My gosh, it’s like a bank robber having a sibling who’s a bank president! Who could see what’s coming next. Well, no, you’d be wrong. Because it’s just that dumb. She’s in the middle of a divorce from her smarmy, cad husband, so her guard is down (I guess). So when her estranged, art-thief brother shows up out of the blue at her office — which just happens to be an art museum — she’s seemingly not at all suspicious. And when he screws her over and grabs a painting off the wall, she jumps in a getaway car with him for some reason and races around London avoiding cops and crashing into everything. And, again, she’s seemingly surprised she gets fired? And everyone just kind of shrugs and moves on — as if a high-speed chase around a major European city after an art theft wouldn’t make a blip or have any consequences. No, none of this makes sense. And this was written by the dude who wrote Zodiac! But who also wrote White House Down. Which makes waaaay more sense. At least that one was so bad it was funny. This was not funny — even when it meant to be.

I’m honestly not sure the plot is worth rehashing. It’s complete nonsense. Trope of tropes, the siblings decide that they’re going to basically reconcile their broken relationship by finally going after The Fountain of Youth, which was their father’s life-long obsession. Or not? Dad sounds like a kook. Meanwhile, we meet the clearly evil billionaire industrialist, Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), who is going to bankroll this adventure. Yes, because, those types are often the altruistic heroes of these films. Derp, so dumb and obvious. It makes you wonder if these two might have been dropped on their heads as babies. What follows is just a string of absolutely terrible writing, impossibly stupid scenarios and what feels like a film that either got completely butchered in the edit suite or just had no plan out the gate. A Mexican shootout between our adventure team, a group of Thai gangsters and Interpol. Many dead bodies, but it’s all wiped away once we move on to the next scene. A literal raising of the Lusitania from the ocean floor on a whim at the cost of… what? Impossible. An escape tunnel that magically appears exactly where our heroes need it to be that also exits exactly where they need it to be. Magic! Some really awkward CGI that I think is supposed to teach both our characters and us the lesson that it’s cool if you care about other people instead of just being a selfish jerk. And piles of bodies outside a pyramid — including bunches of international police — that just magically vanish and are instantaneously forgotten about. There’s a lot of there here. Action set piece followed by another action set piece with no connective tissues and no indication that what came before it even happened.

Oh, did I mention that Natalie Portman has her ten-year-old kid with her during all this? Yeah, her scumbag husband gets bought off by Gleeson’s character and just fucks off to Asia somewhere. But somehow this little braniac is smarter than all the adults (another trope) and isn’t completely traumatized by all the murders and a scene pretty much ripped directly off Raiders’ Ark of the Covenant scene? Nah, it’s cool, there are no consequences for anything in this film. Almost forgot, there’s some ancient sect that basically guard the Fountain. They’re not good at their jobs, apparently. Better than the Grail Knight in The Last Crusade, I suppose, but they definitely get in there and mess stuff up. Granted, I did enjoy Eiza González’s, uh, performance as one of the guardians who unsurprisingly eventually ends up joining forces with the siblings because why could this movie get any dumber. While her part is a bit all over the place — and she has to be in scenes with an increasingly odd Stanley Tucci — I appreciated her presence. I’m sure Apple got whatever it is that wanted out of this, but audiences will eventually wisen up that this could have just as easily been an AI-generated “adventure” movie made from the Internet’s spare parts.