Fountain of Youth is the kind of bad film we deserve. It’s flagrant nonsense, unbothered by how directly it borrows from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or that its supposed expert archaeologists explain to each other, “in Latin, ‘v’ is ‘w’”, and have to google the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But it’s the Guy Ritchie brand of nonsense, at least – it has, like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword or (the admittedly far superior) Sherlock Holmes before it, a little zing to it. A sense of character. And, because Apple TV+ seems to have no concept of budgets, it’s also stretched across a slew of glitzy international locations, including a climactic shootout at the base of the Pyramids of Giza.
This is a film that’s fun to complain about. We first meet flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants adventurer Luke Purdue (John Krasinski, in a role that, arguably, would have been perfect for Chris Pratt) as he tracks down his younger sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman). He wants to guilt-trip her into leaving her cosy existence as a museum curator and join him to track down the Fountain of Youth, the mythical spring said to reverse the ageing process and cure sickness. It’s all at the behest, and on the dime, of dying billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson).
Charlotte, in her own words, “had to grow up”. She now has to contend with a son (Benjamin Chivers) and an ex-husband (Daniel De Bourg), who’s dressed like he’s been printed out from the M&S catalogue. So she’ll follow Luke, but she’ll complain that this is crazy the entire time, all while they’re being chased down by the so-called “protectors” of the world’s magical secrets, led by Eiza González’s Esme. They go from London to Vienna to Cairo, pilfering priceless artefacts in a world where CCTV was apparently never invented.
A pit stop that involves dredging up the RMS Lusitania, the passenger ship famously sunk by a German U-boat in 1915, all in order to retrieve a single item seems like quite the drastic detour until you realise the film’s screenwriter, James Vanderbilt, is the great-grandson of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Sr. He died on the Lusitania, and it’s his belongings Luke and Charlotte are after.
The sequence itself, which involves a fight in the ship’s rusted-out and seaweed-slathered bones, is at least its own spectacle. And Ritchie sneaks in a decent amount of his madcap Ritchie-isms – a crashing motorcyclist smacks right into the camera, Luke and Esme are shushed while grappling each other in a Viennese library, and Stanley Tucci turns up for a cameo set at the Vatican which, if you believe hard enough, could be as his character from Conclave.
This would all be easier to enjoy, however, if the film had any sense of sincerity about its throwback spirit. There’s an aggravating, smart-alec streak to the dialogue, meaning Krasinski and Portman deliver their lines like they’re jokes even though they’re objectively not (Gleeson is the only one who manages to avoid this awkwardness; he’s genuinely funny when allowed to be). The riddles are insultingly basic and the sets have the cartoonish look of a themed escape room, while there’s a moment here or there where the film starts to slowly tip into cultural insensitivity. That said, considering this is being released directly onto Apple TV+, most of its audience will be watching it with one eye on their phone. Maybe in that context, Fountain of Youth plays like a masterpiece.
Dir: Guy Ritchie. Starring: John Krasinski, Natalie Portman, Eiza González, Domhnall Gleeson, Arian Moayed, Laz Alonso, Carmen Ejogo, Stanley Tucci. Cert 12A, 125 minutes
‘Fountain of Youth’ streams on Apple TV+ from 23 May
